Pennsylvania became the 24th state in the country to implement an automatic voter registration process earlier this week.

Eligible Pennsylvanians will be automatically registered to vote when they renew their driver’s licenses or ID cards through Penndot. It fulfills a campaign promise made by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro.

Robby Brod, WITF's Democracy Beat reporter was on The Spark Friday where he explained voters previously could register to vote when applying for a driver's license but now they'll be registered to vote automatically,"Previously, eligible voters were required to opt in to the voter registration process while going through this process. But now it's going to kind of be flipped where they're going to have to opt out of it. And Pennsylvanians have been able to register to vote at DMVs. I'm going back to 1993. So essentially, this is kind of flips the requirement from opting out, from opting in to opting out."

Shapiro said the idea is to get more Pennsylvanians registered to vote and to actually vote.

Since the 2020 election, anything having to do with voting and elections will get some criticism. Several Republican lawmakers took Shapiro to task for not going through the legislature to approve the automatic voter registration process. The conservative Freedom Caucus threatened legal action Friday.

One of the criticisms is that non-American citizens will register to vote. Brod was asked about that,"The only people who will be eligible to register to vote while getting a driver's license or getting a different form of ID or something like that are people who are already determined to be eligible to be able to vote. So, somebody who is going to get a driver's license, who's not a citizen, they won't even be asked to register to vote because while they're registering, if they provide a Social Security number, which some non-American citizens are issued because they do work in the state and in the country that needs to be taxed. Somebody, a non-citizen with a Social Security number going to register to get a driver's license. They're not going to be asked to register to vote because while going through the process, it will be determined that they're ineligible. So the same documents that you use to register to get a driver's license are not the same that you need to require to vote."

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