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D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells wants the District of Columbia to catch up with the early 2000s and allow residents to register to vote online. Instead of obtaining, or even downloading, a paper form and mailing it back to the D.C. Board of Elections, residents would be able to fill out a web form and get registered.

“We remain woefully out-of-date,” Wells, a Democrat who represents Ward 6, said at today’s legislative session.

And when the trendsetter in online voter registration is Arizona, of all places, that “out-of-date” appellation really sticks. Currently, Arizona and 11 other states allow their residents to file voter registrations on the Internet, and five more are preparing to implement such systems. And about 10 more state legislatures around the country are also deliberating legislation that would create online voter registration, according to Mindy Moretti, a D.C. political operative and an editor of the election information website ElectionLine.

“From a user standpoint, it’s hugely effective to the voter,” Moretti says. “You can do everything online, why shouldn’t you be able to register to vote?”

Online voter registration can be a big money saver, too. Since Arizona adopted it in 2002, Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix and the surrounding area, has saved more than $1 million, Moretti says. Officials in Oregon have also seen the cost of processing voter registrations drop considerably, from $3 per registration to 85 cents.

“There’s not the processing and the paper,” Moretti says. “They don’t have to print them out. The cost analysis is amazing.”

But D.C. lags behind. Maryland is one of the 12 states that offer online voter registration, and Virginia legislators last month unanimously approved adopting it in that state. Wells, who is expected to announce a bid in the 2014 mayoral election, introduced a similar bill last year, but it did not get much of a chance.

Moretti, a former advisory neighborhood commissioner and veteran of several local campaigns, says the D.C. Board of Elections needs online voter registration badly. “There are typos, duplicates, this would clear a lot of those problems up,” says Moretti, who is currently serving as treasurer of Bryan Weaver’s campaign in the 2014 Democratic primary for the Ward 1 Council seat.

“A lot of time someone will get married and change their name, but they don’t bother to change their license and the Board of Elections,” she says. “They’ll write their married name on the form … it can absolutely be dismissed.”

However, the most glaring thing about the District not offering online voter registration might be a matter of simple civic infrastructure, Moretti says. Unlike the states, D.C. has no subsidiary counties or towns, or a secretary of state’s office.

“The District is a single-entity jurisdiction,” Moretti says. “I’ll never understand why we don’t have it in D.C. yet.”