This article considers the potential impact of two relatively new ways that state election officials have attempted to improve the registration of voters in their states: namely, through online registration opportunities and by adopting automatic voter registration. This article considers this question by tracking two registration innovations—online registration and automatic voter registration—across 10 years (2008–2018, six elections), in 49 American states. It tests their impact on an individual's likelihood of registering and voting, as collected through survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and the Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplement. The results in this article suggest that while convenience measures are designed to improve registration and voting rates, they may not result in across-the-board increases that some policymakers and advocates hope for. Nevertheless, there may be some differential impacts of these innovations on registration and turnout, particularly for youth and minority voters.
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