That’s the subtitle of a working paper that Thad Hall, Morgan Llewellyn and I recently posted to the VTP website: “How hard can it be: do citizens think it is difficult to register to vote?” This is the first in a number of papers that we hope to finish soon, detailing some of the interesting and intriguing results we are getting out of the public opinion data we have collected in recent years regarding opinions about voting technology and election reform.

In this paper, we developed and implemented a survey question asking respondents whether they thought it was easy or difficult in their state to register and vote. We found that 10% of respondents in our samples stated that it was difficult to register to vote in their state. We also found that those who said they thought was difficult to register to vote in their state were concentrated in certain segments of the population: younger voters, political independents, and those not currently registered to vote.