The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 (P.L. 103-31) was designed to reduce the cost of voting by incorporating registration into a transaction with a public agency that citizens initiate for another purpose. The act took effect on January 1, 1995; between then and the 1996 election, 18,333,479 people registered in offices they had visited on other business (Federal Election Commission 1998, Table 2).Most of these were new registrations; the remainder were largely changes of address. (We are grateful to Brian Hancock of the Federal Election Commission for his help in interpreting this table.) They are 44% of the total of 41.1 million “registration applications or transactions” of any sort recorded in the 43 states subject to the NVRA in 1995–96. Six states are exempt from the NVRA; five—Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—because they permit electionday registration at the polling place and North Dakota, which does not require voter registration. Vermont's constitutional provisions kept it from implementing the NVRA by 1996. Four years later, answers to even the most elementary questions about this first NVRA election have not been published. We narrow the data gap by describing people who used NVRA to register, and then comparing their participation to that of their fellow citizens who registered to vote using more traditional methods.