OLYMPIA – The state of Oregon has some good-government types agog and aglow over its new law on voter registration.

Perhaps that’s because the good-govs have had little to celebrate on the voter registration front recently, what with conservatives passing tougher identification laws and the Voting Rights Act being fed to a Bass-O-Matic by the Supreme Court. So they jumped on Oregon’s law that automatically signs a person up to vote unless he or she actively opts out, as a great step forward.

In fact, it’s a terrible idea if what you’re trying to do is get more people to vote. What it likely will do is get a greater share of registered voters to not vote.

It was not difficult in Oregon to register to vote. The franchise was not exclusive to special members of a certain race, creed, gender or ethnic origin, unless one counts being an actual resident of the state and an American citizen as an onerous qualification. One did not have to pass a test, pay a tax, swear an oath of fealty, walk 50 miles through the wilderness in the snow or even show up in person at the county elections office to register. One could do it online, simply providing a number from an Oregon driver’s license or state ID card.

In that respect registration in Oregon was much like it is in Washington. Pretty darn easy.

Starting last week, it got easier. Now, when one shows up the Department of Motor Vehicles to get or renew a driver’s license, that person will automatically be registered to vote unless he or she opts out by sending back a postcard that will arrive in the mail in a few weeks. Not sure if the e box to check will say “No thanks” or “I am a politically illiterate deadbeat with no social conscience and not a care in the world for what insanity the people elected to various local, state and federal offices decide to inflict on me.”

Oregon officials estimate that it will add as many as 800,000 citizens, who are currently eligible to vote but not registered, to their rolls which currently have about 2.2 million. That would be just super if there was a prize for having the highest percentage of people who can register be registered. But until some fourth generation billionaire decides to assuage a guilty conscience for all the bad things great-grandpa did to get the money he pumped into the trust fund by creating a foundation to award such an honor, it won’t count for much.

What counts in elections is not how many people are registered, but how many vote. Making it easier to register brings in a larger share of people marginally motivated – to register and to vote. There’s a very good chance that many of those who are signed up automatically will care so little about voting that they’ll throw out their ballot – Oregon mails ballots to all voters, just like Washington – or leave it sitting in a stack of junk mail until reading or hearing “It’s Election Day!”

And here’s where the big difference between Oregon and Washington in voting comes in: Oregon voters can’t mail their ballots back postmarked on Election Day like we can. Their ballots have to be at the elections office by that night. Their choice on the big day is to look up the location of the nearest drop box and drive there by closing time, or throw it out. For the person who wasn’t all that concerned about registering to vote in the first place, which option is more likely?

Oregon’s turnout – traditionally the number of people voting divided by the number who registered – is much more likely to go down rather than up in the coming years. The number of ballots cast might not change much, except once every four years when more people get the urge to vote for president. But even then, the results aren’t likely to be significantly different unless there’s a super close race like Bush-Gore in Florida in 2000 or Gregoire-Rossi in Washington in 2004.

This would all be Oregon’s problem if it weren’t for the fact that the two states watch and sometimes emulate each other on “progressive” ideas. Washington went all-mail voting after Oregon did it. Oregon went to recreational marijuana after Washington. Both of those made sense. But we shouldn’t let anyone try to push this idea across the river like a case of overrated pinot noir.

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