• Home
  • Independent Voter News
  • Quizzes
  • Election Dissection
  • Sections
  • Events
  • Directory
  • About Us
  • Glossary
  • Opinion
  • Campaign Finance
  • Redistricting
  • Civic Ed
  • Voting
  • Fact Check
  • News
  • Analysis
  • Subscriptions
  • Log in
Leveraging Our Differences
  • news & opinion
    • Big Picture
      • Civic Ed
      • Ethics
      • Leadership
      • Leveraging big ideas
      • Media
    • Business & Democracy
      • Corporate Responsibility
      • Impact Investment
      • Innovation & Incubation
      • Small Businesses
      • Stakeholder Capitalism
    • Elections
      • Campaign Finance
      • Independent Voter News
      • Redistricting
      • Voting
    • Government
      • Balance of Power
      • Budgeting
      • Congress
      • Judicial
      • Local
      • State
      • White House
    • Justice
      • Accountability
      • Anti-corruption
      • Budget equity
    • Columns
      • Beyond Right and Left
      • Civic Soul
      • Congress at a Crossroads
      • Cross-Partisan Visions
      • Democracy Pie
      • Our Freedom
  • Pop Culture
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
  • events
  • About
      • Mission
      • Advisory Board
      • Staff
      • Contact Us
Sign Up
  1. Home>
  2. Voting>
  3. voter registration>

D.C. abandons online registration, saying app is too buggy to fix

Our Staff
August 20, 2020
Washington, DC; voter registration
Photographer is my life./Getty Images

The nation's capital, of all places, is joining the roster of just nine states that don't have online voter registration.

The D.C. Board of Elections has pulled the plug on the app and online portal that allowed residents to register or update their voter information, saying the software had proved unreliable and had too many bugs to fix.

It's the second significant election snafu this month in Washington, where such snags receive outsized attention because so many policymakers and people in the political industry are among the 700,000 residents.


A questionnaire mailed two weeks ago — meant to smooth a November election planned for the first time to be almost entirely by mail because of the pandemic — had a design flaw rendering the collected data minimally useful. That prompted bipartisan skepticism about the city's competence to conduct elections after a June primary marred by some of the longest lines in the country and more than 1,000 lost applications for absentee ballots.

That confidence gap will only grow with the death of the Vote4DC system, which officials concede is not likely to be replaced by Nov. 3 because no vendor has been found and extensive testing of a new system would be required.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Residents can still register to vote by mail — or in person on Election Day or at an early voting site, hardly ideal during the Covid-19 outbreak. And so Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the committee that oversees the elections board, demanded Wednesday that a new app be "up and running" in time for the election.

There are not many hot local contests on the ballot, and the main interest is in whether Joe Biden will carry the District's 3 electoral votes with more than Hillary Clinton's 91 percent share four years ago.

"Either it wouldn't transmit information or it would go down, or it just wasn't doing the things that it was supposed to do," Board of Elections Chairman Michael Bennett told TV station WUSA in explaining the move. "The vendor wasn't able to make the corrections in a timely manner, so we just took it down rather than continue to have people use it and be confused."

Of 40,000 new or updated registrations last year in the fast-growing city, two in five were through the Vote4DC system. That's higher than the one-in-six estimated share in the 40 states that have embraced online registration as both the 21st century best practice and a cost-saver. (A Pew Charitable Trusts survey five years ago found that each registration on paper costs between 50 cents and $2.34 more to process than when done using the internet.)

From Your Site Articles
  • Two justices defend being part of a case involving a company where ... ›
  • BPC urges broad changes to voting procedures nationwide - The ... ›
  • Coronavirus threatens to hobble voter registration efforts - The Fulcrum ›
  • Ranked-Choice Voting Gets Next Test in D.C. Suburbs - The Fulcrum ›
Related Articles Around the Web
  • Your Guide To Voting In D.C., Maryland Or Virginia | WAMU ›
  • D.C. No Longer Has Online Voter Registration | DCist ›
  • DC Board of Elections ›
  • Register/Update Voter ... - District of Columbia Board of Elections ›
voter registration
Get some Leverage Sign up for The Fulcrum Newsletter
Follow
Contributors

But what can I do?

Pedro Silva

Are large donor networks still needed to win in a fairer election system?

Paige Chan

Independent voters want to be heard. Is anybody listening?

David Thornburgh
John Opdycke

The U.S. has been seeking the center since the days of Teddy Roosevelt

Dave Anderson

Imperfection and perseverance

Jeff Clements

We’ve expanded the Supreme Court before. It’s time to do so again.

Anushka Sarkar
latest News

Biden follows Trump’s lead in expanding use of executive orders

Reya Kumar
3h

Podcast: 100% Democracy

Our Staff
15h

Americans want action on gun control, but the Senate can’t move forward

David Meyers
25 May

Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

Our Staff
25 May

Nearly 20 states have restricted private funding of elections

David Meyers
24 May

Video: Will Trump run in 2024?

Our Staff
24 May
Videos

Video: Helping loved ones divided by politics

Our Staff

Video: What happened in Virginia?

Our Staff

Video: Infrastructure past, present, and future

Our Staff

Video: Beyond the headlines SCOTUS 2021 - 2022

Our Staff

Video: Should we even have a debt limit

Our Staff

Video: #ListenFirstFriday Yap Politics

Our Staff
Podcasts

Podcast: Did economists move the Democrats to the right?

Our Staff
02 May

Podcast: The future of depolarization

Our Staff
11 February

Podcast: Sore losers are bad for democracy

Our Staff
20 January

Deconstructed Podcast from IVN

Our Staff
08 November 2021
Recommended
President Biden signs executive order on police reform

Biden follows Trump’s lead in expanding use of executive orders

Balance of Power
Podcast: 100% Democracy

Podcast: 100% Democracy

Leadership
people talking

But what can I do?

Leveraging big ideas
Shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas

Americans want action on gun control, but the Senate can’t move forward

Congress
Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

Big Picture
First-ever majority-female New York city council

Are large donor networks still needed to win in a fairer election system?

Campaign Finance