More and more Americans look to the Internet to find a variety of information, and going online has increasingly become a part of peoples' daily lives. Registration lookup tools provide voters essential information, such as whether they are registered to vote and whether their information is accurate, in the place many people look first—online. Additionally, election offices can save time and money when voters check this type of information online instead of calling local officials.
Forty-one states and the District of Columbia currently provide such a tool for all voters on their state election websites, according to new research from the Pew Center on the States, which examined all state election websites over the course of a two-week period in September. These are the same 41 states that provided this information on their websites in 2010, the last time Pew conducted this assessment. See our report Being Online is Still Not Enough. In 2008, 25 states and the District of Columbia had this tool in place.
Nine states do not provide an online tool, which allows voters to verify that they are registered and see whether their information is accurate. However, two of these states—Delaware and Oklahoma—do provide online polling place lookup tools that require users to be registered to vote in order to access the information.