Love government red tape, Missouri? Then this wasteful DC election law is for you | Opinion

Every driver knows what it feels like to take time off work, find parking and carry an armful of documents into the DMV, only to be told that they can’t renew their plates without providing one more piece of paper. Most of us probably also know what it’s like to be bounced around government offices just to fill out a single form because there’s no simple way for separate county offices to access one another’s records.

Why in the world then would we want people to have that experience when they register to vote — especially when tools are readily available for election offices not only to make the process smoother for voters, but more secure and verifiable?

The SAVE Act currently in the U.S. House and Senate would require voters to bring citizenship verification paperwork to election offices in person when they register to vote or update their registration — even though that paperwork is issued by other government agencies. It makes far more sense for an election office to access that paperwork in a streamlined way from its sister government agencies such as the United States Department of State and Missouri Department of Revenue, which issue passports and REAL IDs. Instead, the SAVE Act asks local government and voters to do the same work twice.

That’s the definition of red tape.

Duplication of work isn’t even the worst offense when it comes to government inefficiency in the SAVE Act. The reality is that the law would complicate voter list maintenance and introduce unnecessary risk into election administration. It would create a bifurcated voter registration system in nearly every state, requiring local election offices — most of which are staffed by a handful of full-time staff — to manage two separate voter lists. Voters who bring in citizenship paperwork would be added to a list of voters eligible to vote in federal, state and local elections, and voters who do not bring in the paperwork — even if they are citizens — would be added to a separate list of voters eligible to vote in state and local elections.

We’ve seen the failures of these bifurcated systems in states such as Arizona and Kansas, where implementation efforts have either created messier voter rolls or stalled out completely. Elections are not improved by ill-conceived ideas that haven’t worked in a single state.

Election integrity and government efficiency are not mutually exclusive. American elections have benefited from a host of reforms that increased efficiency for voters and state and local government while increasing integrity. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 gave election offices the ability to check voter registration information against existing government agencies’ data to improve the quality of voter rolls across the country. In the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act with the explicit intention of increasing efficiency and accuracy in elections administration by reducing duplicate voter registration records and funding the replacement of old and poorly-performing voting equipment.

Most important, these effective reforms increased efficiency and integrity without shifting the burden to voters. State and local elections offices bore the responsibility to implement both laws because that’s our job. Our work is to keep voter rolls up to date, verify voters’ eligibility using the tools we can access from state and federal agencies, and ensure that our elections are safe, accessible and secure.

At a time when the goal for the government is to eliminate waste and increase efficiency, the SAVE Act is not it. Ensuring that the country’s voter rolls include only eligible voters is an important and worthwhile endeavor, but the SAVE Act in its current form does a terrible job of attaining that goal. Instead, we should be demanding improvements — such as secure data sharing across government agencies — that are cheaper, more efficient and far less labor intensive ways of achieving clean voter rolls and election integrity.