When I first registered in Texas, they told me that something didn’t match the details with Social Security and that they couldn’t process my registration. Unfortunately, they never told me exactly what didn’t match. After chasing Social Security and the county multiple times, I eventually figured out that someone had put an extra space in my middle name. The staff processing my request were very helpful, but unfortunately, they didn’t even know what exactly was not matching.
It’s really unfortunate that you have the burden of proving that your information is correct. It took me about 6/7 weeks to complete the entire process.
They also mail you a voter registration card (which itself isn’t useful anywhere), and if, for any reason, it doesn’t reach you, your name will be suspended from the list.
The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
When corporations use similar tactics we call them “dark patterns”. Unfortunately, the only weapon we the people have against these tactics is regulation. But when it’s the government doing these things… anyway. Hope the Democratic Party has learned that conservative leadership won’t evolve their platform, they’ll reject democracy.
There’s a good number of sincere democrats who are being hamstrung by an aging and self-interested Democratic leadership.
The Democrat Party, as an organization, exists first and foremost to fundraise and the best way to do that is to seek corporate donors, thanks to Citizens United, since its easier to court one or two very large donations than hundreds or thousands of small individual donors.
What happens politically and the resultant laws are basically secondary. You, the taxpayer, doesn’t pay the DNC to do its job. Donors do.
literally nobody cares what the official title of the party is, which is why they post wrong titles. We all know which one is meant and you're being pointlessly obtuse.
I mean - as much as it's the "better" of the two options right now... the modern democratic party is still a center-right party controlled mostly by corporate interests and lobbying money.
They favor keeping the system that is producing rampant inequity stable. With a laissez faire approach to social issues.
As opposed to republicans, who favor socially regressive and oppressive policies, double speak, and who's mantra is mostly "Don't get caught. But if you do get caught - deny, deflect, denounce" rather than anything resembling ethical behavior.
Neither of them are particularly good options for governance. They have no motivations to "learn" anything.
One is a fast moving, malignant cancer - the other a slow moving auto-immune disease. Both kill the host.
Personally, I'd also like to see party influence removed from elections. Completely removed at the time of actual election (ex - absolutely not allowed to list party on the ballot) but also reduced at the primary level (ex - no more closed primaries, maybe eliminate partisan primaries entirely).
Politics isn't a team sport with winners and losers, and this attitude (especially concerning given the recent moves by republican leaders to explicitly disenfranchise and withhold support for locations that trend democratic) is utterly reprehensible (which is fairly in theme with their overall moral character).
We're one nation. Politicians serve the populace, regardless of whether those people voted for them or not.
"The only weapon we the people have against these tactics is regulation"
That's not true. If it's a company doing it, you have the choice to not be a customer of the company. Don't give them any of your money if you don't like how they do business.
The same can't be said of government. If you don't give your money, in the form of taxes, you go to jail.
> That's not true. If it's a company doing it, you have the choice to not be a customer of the company.
Ah yes, 2026 America, famous for its wealth of commercial competition and diversity of business practices. Just the other day I was bragging to my friends how many reasonable options I have for so many of my critical necessities, including televisions and other cheap plastic cheap manufactured in China and white-labeled by glorified dropshippers.
The corporations are quickly becoming the government you are so quick to demonize. The death panels that FoxNews spoke about 24/7 back in 2010 are now embedded into our insurance industry, except you have no democratic recourse and will be statistically drained of your wealth before your offspring have a chance to inherit it, all while they watch you die and stress over the Byzantine processes that are “economically efficient”.
Luigi didn't trigger any sort of mass uprising against the elites, didn't inspire copycats or revolutionaries. No reform of insurance or pharma costs occurred, all of the problems he ostensibly opposed are still there. He just got arrested and became a meme for a while.
Meh, I think a lot of my people in my cohort are a lot more sympathetic towards people who lash out violently against the Kafkaesque capitalist system that many of us are suffering under. It also engrained a cultural understanding (in my cohort) that profit-seeking is not a shield of innocence: many agree that the leadership of United was inherently evil due to their business practices.
So, there has been a shift in our shared reality. Maybe not as significant as something like 9/11, but maybe an order of magnitude or two below it.
> The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
Possible, but I doubt it. I've worked on the systems that do things like ID correlation/verification on the backend. They're ... imagine the most broken possible implementation you've ever worked on, then imagine it worse, then imagine that it's maintained by entirely different contractors than the ones that built it, with minimal incentive for improvement.
That's most of government IT implementations, and has been for decades.
Even when specific systems in this area are implemented well, the regulatory/bureaucratic complexity of the government prevents them from being more than marginally useful at best. I expanded more on some of the concerns/issues in this area in an adjacent comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832393
Maybe that's the designed part? I mean, in lots of more "modern" countries (for the lack of better word), voting is basically showing up, presenting ID, then you can check for the results online yourself to see it registered properly, then that's it.
To me the whole system with voter registration and all other jazz, seems designed to indeed discourage people from voting. Why wouldn't you want it to be efficient and simple otherwise?
The system is designed to rely on fundamentally-flawed things like ID correlation and verification. Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.
> Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.
I have trouble believing that, given that the "design", such as it is, took place over many decades of inter-agency regulatory/technical wrangling and organic growth.
At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals. Sometimes those goals were "make sure everyone eligible can vote as easily as possible"--and that's laudable! But more often the goals were "build $niche_system_component to comply with $specific_regulation". The number of times, during the design phase, where the people planning actually wanted to suppress votes and were empowered to make a part of the system actually do that was probably a rounding error compared to times when people fully accidentally moved the system in that direction due to bureaucratic myopia and shitty implementation.
I'm all for blaming political actors for things they intentionally do that are bad! Defunding the EPA? Bad! Getting into stupid wars? Bad! Banning mail-in voting? Bad! People with power and pre-meditated goals did those things, and many more, and should be opposed for it.
But "voting system is broken due to bureaucratic inter-operation failures, and state government staff have to do a postmortem and data recovery (ballot reprocessing)" isn't one of those times.
But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".
The malicious-officials problem has fixes like "vote people out" and "decommission harmful programs" and "restore cut funding".
The busted-data-system problem has fixes like "national ID card system" or "remove regulations preventing effective data sharing" or "hold system implementors responsible for failures".
If you see the disenfranchisement/conspiracy of the former in the bureaucratic/tech debt of the latter, you'll fix the wrong problems in the wrong ways, and make things worse.
> But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".
The problem is when "oops we did a little oopsiefuckup" starts to look like a deliberate pattern to cause chaos.
American bureaucracy developed differently from European bureaucracy. In Europe countries developed very centralised governments who found it useful to track their citizens.
Borders mattered (to the exact m²) and armies of conscripts needed to be raised. They needed to know exactly how many 20 year old men there were and where they lived.
Chaos was not an option.
That's only possible in countries with completely broken citizen IDs (like the US and the UK). Of course correlation is messy and broken and it's not used in other countries. It's also intentional because every attempt at fixing gets stopped or even backtracked.
In other countries citizens have IDs, and the ID can be sometimes wrong (ask me how I know, although that was back in the paper era) and that's the one thing that needs to be fixed. Once the ID is correct, everything works, because that's the single source of truth after that.
> The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
It is, with specific emphasis on discouraging people in cities from voting. The state has done all sorts of fuckery to limit the ability of people in urban centers from having any voice in government. Some of the most incredible gerrymanders in the country, limits on voting locations and times imposed specifically on large cities, many small frictions to make voting more time-consuming and expensive.
It's why they can get away with naked corruption and bumbling incompetence and still retain a firm hold on power. Well, that, and copious oil billionaire money flowing to Texas elections.
the entire concept of "voter registration" (and associated shenanigans) is so alien to my European brain that I fail to see any reason why the richest country in the world does things this way other than voter suppression. What am I missing?
It's a distinct blue/red state issue. Blue states go out of their way to register as many of their residents as possible and allow same day registration.
The red states, Republicans use it as a tool to reduce participation of urban, non-white voters and reduce overall participation. They don't consider systematic, passive voter suppression techniques to be voter fraud.
Outside of the US spectrum, there are countries that require all citizens to vote or face fines (Peru for example). I find this interesting, because it's so out of sample compared to the typical political fights within the US about voter registration.
> Outside of the US spectrum, there are countries that require all citizens to vote or face fines (Peru for example).
Right, but even for Peruvians, you show up at the both, make your vote and leave, that's it. No thresholds for registering or other stuff, just you and your ID making a vote, even when outside the country. It again makes the US system seem intentionally designed to make less people vote.
This is also seen in the actual voting process itself. Stories about Americans having to stand in the scorching sun for hours are just absolutely mind-boggling to me: you should expect everyone to vote, and provide enough capacity for everyone to cast a vote during their daily commute or grocery trip without a significant delay!
If a bunch of politicians can make voting quasi-impossible for certain groups of people by meddling with their polling stations, then you don't have a functioning democracy.
Australia has both compulsory voting, like Peru, and a separate electoral roll that you have to (and must) apply to get on, like the US. It's not a US thing, it's a common law anglosphere thing.
A website to register doesn't prove it's easy. Texas has one of those too, but obviously it's not proof of it being easy since we're here discussing it.
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it's actually easy in Australia. That still doesn't really explain why it's necessary.
It's necessary because we have elections with geographically based electorates, so your address determines which ballot you should receive (and so they know how to fairly resize the electorates). So you need to tell them somehow where you live. Also, the roll of voters has to be printed out many times to use at "check-in" on voting day, so you need to tell them in advance of this printing. They need consistent rolls because after the election they reconcile the various copies after the election to question/fine people who either didn't vote or voted more than once.
For people not on the roll, there is a special secondary method of voting called a declaration vote that allows you e.g. to vote even if you haven't enrolled. But this process wouldn't scale very well - these votes aren't counted for days after as they need to check the details you declared - and is intended as a safety net.
I'm not sure it's strictly red state/blue state. I've live in Massachusetts and Minnesota for a while, where they made it very easy to vote so that tracks.
However, now I live in New York, where they seem to go out of their way to make it difficult. The registration cutoff is several weeks before the election and for at least one election, I found myself wrongfully expunged from the voter roles.
I think it may just be how corrupt the state government is.
It's the price paid for not having a general population register. You only need to enroll to vote if you want to vote, and the voter registration is (theoretically) only for that purpose and won't be used for other purposes. Every government interaction in the anglosphere works this way; you always have to reprove your id and address from scratch.
More specifically, it pretends it doesn't have a general population register. In reality there is a nearly 1:1 match between citizens and SSNs, but everyone just pretends it doesn't exist for political reasons. The fact that the USA was ever able to do a draft is another obvious counterexample.
It's not really a 1:1 match. Any foreigner who has ever worked in the US has one too (me included). Plus voter registration also covers subnational elections, which SSN data would not help with.
Re: the draft - if you are eligible for it you have to register to it, just like voter registration except it's mandatory. If you don't register for selective service you can't get federal college loans IIRC. You also have to register for the draft to apply for a green card?
If you are a non citizen, you should have "Not valid for work without authorization" written on your social security card. The social security administration knows who is and isn't a citizen because it's the part of the government that's reviewed the paperwork you have proving your status (birth certificate, naturalization document, work authorization etc).
(When you become of US citizen one of the first tasks is to take your naturalization document to your local SSA office so that they can update your file and issue you a new card without the notice)
The only citizens who aren't in the social security database are people who were never registered at birth, either because their parents didn't tick the box when registering or they were born overseas and their parents never registered the birth with the US government. Both can easily get registered via their birth certificate.
Everyone else in the system has already provided documentation to verify their status one way or the other.
The draft also requires registration (I believe to this day, 18 year old males are required to register?), but unlike voter registration, they never "forget" to send it in, or "fail" to do it, or incorrectly "purge" the draft list.
The European population registers are as bad as voter registration btw and as manipulated. I'm currently not registered (which is illegal) as I've been purged from the population register and due to similar bureaucratic excuses, can't re-register. Fortunately it's usually irrelevant, but I have no doubt some government department is bending statistics in its favor by excluding a group of people that includes me.
In my country the main registration fraud is tax fraud, as different municipalities have different tax rates so some people claim to live in a low-tax one while really living elsewhere. But it is also technically voter fraud since the two are linked.
American Democracy started from a place of very strict voter requirements (white, male, adult, landowner) and is trending towards fewer voter requirements.
The registration process is mostly a legacy system to ensure only qualified individuals vote, left over from a time when the bar was much higher.
Pretty sure countries in Europe have voter registration too? Here's a page to register in France. [1]
The US was organized around a very limited federal government (this has changed over time). Each state is responsible for elections within the state. There's no exact national registry of citizens, although Social Security keeps a de facto registry as most citizens are enumerated by that administration and their records include citizenship indication. Strictly speaking, registration with social security is not mandatory, it is required for employees and a child must be registered to qualify for tax credits and it makes administrative tasks simpler.
Within each state, voting is typically administered by county (or similar level) offices; although I think many states have a state wide process to register.
A given voter will vote for many positions (and often some propositions), and electoral boundaries for positions don't necessarily align with anything else or each other. So there's a lot of complexity there.
The residence address of the voter is the important thing that decides which elections they can participate in, but since there is no real registry of residence (de facto or de jure), it needs to be collected seperately.
Since the motor voter bills in the 90s. Most US states handle voter registration via the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). When you apply for your license or renew you tick the box and it automatically registers you.
The drivers license database is the defaco registry of where you live and most states require you to update your address within 2 weeks of moving (although enforcement is loose). There is a state identification card for those who don't drive that fulfills the same purpose as a drivers license.
Since RealID states now have to check immigration status if you request a RealID license (some states will issue non-RealID drivers licenses to the undocumented). There is a further Enhanced ID check that some states do that will indicate that you are a US citizen on the license. RealID and non RealID licenses are clearly marked.
Basically true voter fraud is largely a non issue because the States generally have their systems together. Voter suppression, which is the goal of most of the voting related legislation of the last 20 years, is however rampant.
Being "the richest country in the world", sharing a land border with a much poorer country, has resulted in a population of people who are legally not allowed to reside in the country (whatever you want to call them according to your political affiliation; one side uses a term rooted in their legal status, while the other side uses a term intended to suggest that their inability to produce evidence of legal residence might be for some other benign reason) that is well into seven figures by all credible estimates.
Such people are, of course, not supposed to be allowed to vote in federal elections (18 U.S.C. § 611 , but also just common sense). Voter registration represents one way to detect if someone who has illegally entered the country (and it is common knowledge that one of the two major parties treats such individuals far more favourably than the other) is trying to vote.
It's also, as you were told, seen in France and possibly other European countries; and here in Canada as well — in all these cases, despite the lack of the above problem. It seems to me like an entirely normal thing and I can't really fathom why people would object to it so strenuously. Not everyone is allowed to vote (generally children are not; incarcerated criminals are not in many countries other than the US, including Mexico, Japan and the UK, as well as Australia and NZ on longer sentences; again there is the matter of illegal immigration; in fact, a quick check indicates that non-citizen legal immigrants are not allowed to vote federally hardly anywhere); given the importance of the vote, why would you not want these simple procedures to ensure that voting is done only by those allowed to?
my country (Italy) is also full of immigrants, but it's not a huge problem.
Once I turned 18 I was automatically enrolled in the voting registries, as was everybody else once they got the requirements (18 years, citizenship, no pending penal law issues, etc). While there have been small scale issues, I've never heard of tens of thousands of people purged erroneously from the registries (while it is a regular occurrence in the USA), and no one I know has ever had to do something to be eligible to vote once they had the requirements. I'm sure it happens that people for whatever reason are not automatically registered, but it's not a common occurrence at all.
> given the importance of the vote, why would you not want these simple procedures to ensure that voting is done only by those allowed to
because these simple procedures are not necessary to achieve that objective
The model was conceived when there were wide plain, few people and traveling messaging results took days to weeks. And it was never adapted. I'd say most of European voting was with shorter distances, higher population density and newer technology.
It's not mandatory in the UK, but it's pretty frictionless. The only downside is that the data is sold commercially.
Conservatives attempted to copy the US voter ID requirements, but without realizing that the underlying demographic distribution of ID is different, and besides you can just postal vote anyway.
You aren't missing anything, it's almost all about voter suppression, and a lot of that is about racism.
And it isn't even a secret. You can find quotes where politicians talk openly about it. I'm trying to be neutral here but when I say "politicians" I mean within one party.
Since my previous iteration of the comment was completely illegitimately flagged, here it is again:
> I read your Fox News article. It does not even remotely establish anything like "talking openly" about "racism". In fact, it explicitly portrays the "politicians" in question advocating for "a proof of citizenship mandate for the voter registration process, and a nationwide photo ID rule to cast a ballot", and describing these as "really commonsense provisions", which they would be in countries that didn't form as an amalgamation of existing states (provinces, cantons, whatever you want to call them). All the arguments I've heard against this bill have been absurd, for example a canard about women supposedly not being able to prove their (entirely optional) name change when they get married.
This is a completely reasonable argument to make and it is completely unreasonable to try to suppress it, even if you disagree. If you believe there is something in the Fox News article that supports your claim, feel free to quote it. If "you can find" these quotes, show me some. Like, from within the last few years, not from the Goldwater era, please.
I see that at least two people saw fit to downvote the above without comment.
I cannot fathom a legitimate reason why. Perhaps someone might care to, for example, quote the part of the article I overlooked, in which Republicans are supposedly openly discussing their supposed racist motivations for desiring "a proof of citizenship mandate for the voter registration process, and a nationwide photo ID rule to cast a ballot"? Or provide real evidence that the SAVE act would actually disenfranchise people who actually do have a legal right to vote? Or perhaps an argument for why the franchise should be extended to people whose presence within the American borders is already a violation of federal law?
Do you live in one of the European countries that has a registry of all citizens? At some point, the government needs to have some notion of who you are. The US has no central registry, so it gets pushed out to the periphery like this.
The Federal government has several central registries. The social security database for example knows which socials belong to citizens and which do not. The IRS database another as are the passport and visa databases.
The problem is that they aren't interconnected in any meaningful way by design so the bulk of the work gets pushed onto states. Real ID forced a lot of the states to get their act together but it's still a bit of a goat rodeo in places.
Just to add to this, not only does the federal government have, for example, SSNs, but, e.g., in my state, supplying a SSN (which then gets verified with the federal government by the state government) is one of the ways in which you can prove citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote.
There's also birth certificates, which are state-based databases, AFAIK, so there is that route too, and that process is more along the lines of how we're a federation.
(& for voter registration, probably the most common method, at least IME, is to bootstrap that from your state license/ID; since those are generally REAL IDs now, most individuals would provide birth cert and SSN, since that is the most broadly fulfillable requirement of REAL ID.)
I'd say it's more than a technical problem. The States have primary responsibility for regulating voting, and do not seem at all interested in handing that over to the federal government. Even if it is just to get access to databases (which I assume they already have anyway if they want it).
Yes, and Social Security number is used as universal identifier today because it's the only thing available, it was never intended as such. There's a long history of resistance to central data collection in the US.
None of those registries is comprehensive, even if they're literally all joined together, and the only one coming close to it SSA. IRS and passports is are particularly nasty ones to rely on because you'd systematically disenfranchise specific demographics like young adults, poor people, etc.
Do you speak for all of Europe? Or do different countries in Europe have different approaches to voting? What you are missing is that this is similar to the US in that we have fifty different States each of which handle voting their own way. There is no singular answer at the federal level, though some people are trying to push in that direction.
Correct. In my country anyone is able to audit the process, and the only case of fraud was an instance of "granny farming" for local municipality elections - which after a full redo resulted in... exactly the same outcome.
Stopping voter fraud really isn't that difficult. Just don't over-complicate it with silly things like electronic voting machines or mass mail-in voting and there's not a lot that can go wrong.
With paper ballots or even an auditable paper trail from electronic voting machines, it's basically impossible to commit large-scale voter fraud, and every audit that I'm aware of in recent first-world elections has shown voter fraud to be a tiny number of votes at most.
We should be very, very wary of non-auditable electronic voting though.
Yes. Just like there is basically zero fraud in America. This isn't a problem. It is only for the dumbest people who believe Trump that 'millions of illegal immigrants voted' yet they haven't produced a single bit of evidence to prove it, but I'm sure it's real.
from that source: a dmv program errored and registered some people to vote. So the government itself made the error. Out of 4 million voters in NJ, 400 ineligible people voted. And were caught. Oregon found 30 ineliglbe voters cast ballots. And were caught. Colorado, none were allowed to vote. In CA, 1.5k incorrectly registered voters _may_ have voted, and of those, _some_ might not have been US citizens.
This is the strongest evidence the nation can turn up on voter fraud. It sure looks to me that the system is catching the absolutely minuscule amount of non-voters voting and that voter fraud is mostly a non-issue.
It appears the more common voter fraud is a US citizen voting in elections outside their home residence. Like Ken Paxton, running for senate in TX, who it appears voted numerous times using his ex-wife's address, including to vote for himself.
To be fair, as was seen with Bush v. Gore a very small number of votes can change the entire political landscape. Something probably ought to be done about that as well.
You deliberately left out facts to support your bias. 4,000,000 votes case. So 0.01%. If the election was that close a recount would be done anyway. It does not effect anything at all because our system is already solid and that's a good thing. There is no crisis. There are no major issues in this area. There are major issues with Texas closing down polling places in black neighborhoods but lets all pretend it's illegal voting.
No, it was flagged because you said something untrue and unkind about your political outgroup. In fact, it is not just untrue, but something that said outgroup constantly clarifies to the point where the meme ("but they have to come legally") is a rallying cry. And to the point where many of their strongest voices are legal first or second generation immigrants.
> What examples of American voter fraud (real or alleged) have been promoted in right-wing media within the last 28 days?
and find multiple results with considerable detail. If you want to hear anecdotes from ordinary people who've witnessed it (or at least had good reason for suspicion), it's not hard to find the right circles for that, either. But by its nature, few have access to the information that would be needed to evidence it properly.
More importantly, though, there are plenty of people who can point at how insecure the system is and how cheap and easy it would (or should) be to fix that. It's hard to understand how there can be such strenuous objection to fixing it if there is actually no problem. It's hard to understand how there can be so many people who are definitely following the law, but would face a hardship if expected to prove it even minimally.
Canadians must identify themselves in federal elections (https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...) and normally register in advance (https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=reg&do...) which is usually as simple as ticking a checkbox to give consent for the CRA (equivalent to IRS) to pass on your data to Elections Canada (which is independent of the government). None of this is even slightly controversial here; even our most left-wing parties (and the centre of gravity of our entire system is generally considered to be well to the left of the US's) are not trying to eliminate the requirement.
The Canadian comparison is apples to oranges when you look at and compare the ease of identification and registration (can register at the polls; a massive number of verification methods - vs - sometimes can't, very few verification methods)
There’s a rich history of voter suppression tactics in the US. Naïve conservatives refuse to see the straight line from poll taxes to voter registration deadlines. Anti-democratic conservatives take great joy in continuing the racist and classist traditions of their forefathers (both by blood and by tradition), and you’ll find such characters packed in the state governments in the South.
> Naïve conservatives refuse to see the straight line from poll taxes to voter registration deadlines.
There is no such line. Of course the state and the people should be clear on who is and is not legally entitled to vote, in advance of actual voting. How could it be otherwise?
What are you talking about? I made an "ought" claim, not an "is" one. No matter what democratic polity you're in, the government and the people should be aligned about who is and is not allowed to vote for that government. Otherwise you do not have anything that can be called a democracy.
Voter registration deadlines are a tool for paternalistic racists and classists to enforce their voter suppression agenda with the thinnest veil of plausible deniability. Here you are, declaring their denial as strictly plausible.
Maybe we could have voter registration deadlines if there weren't so many bad actors who use it as a tool for voter suppression, but apparently ~50% of US state governments can't be trusted with that responsibility.
Edit: that's actually the issue, inherently; many rules and requirements for voting sound reasonable when presented absent of the context of the entire history of the United States (especially in the apartheid South...), but there are literal neo-Klansmen who will twist and bend those rules into onerous requirements that make sure that only white wealthy people who live in certain zip codes and have plenty of flexibility in their schedule have an opportunity to vote.
And you fall for that trap with some sort of rationalist aloofness that's so common on this Silicon Valley technology forum. This is why being "woke" matters and the Trumpist campaign against historical literacy is critical to keeping certain states red. The historical literacy in some of these states is already abysmal (based on first-hand conversations), and to think it could get even worse...
What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
> there are literal neo-Klansmen who will twist and bend those rules into onerous requirements
The year is 2026, not 1956.
> And you fall for that trap with some sort of rationalist aloofness that's so common on this Silicon Valley technology forum.
It is not a "trap". It is what actually looking at actual evidence tells me.
By definition, "historical literacy" is something that tells you about what used to happen. This does not explain what currently happens.
What currently happens is explained by looking at contemporary evidence. I have, as a Canadian who constantly has to have these arguments because of the American cultural dominance of the Internet, looked into it quite a bit. It does not support your assertions.
Surely the government already knows who is a citizen (otherwise it would not be able to stop noncitizens from registering), so surely it would be trivial for the government to use this list of citizens to send out ballots?
Citizen baby is born? Add them to the list of citizens. Citizen dies? Remove them from the list of citizens. Citizen moves? Have them inform their new municipality about their change of address - which they'll probably need to do anyways for tax and mail reasons.
> Surely the government already knows who is a citizen
No. There's a lot more nuance there than you'd think, in the "broken regulatory and technical processes" domain, not political issues.
Example questions with unsatisfactory (not "impossible to do well", just "broken due to decades of technical and regulatory debt") answers: what government agencies, plural, are the authority of who is a citizen? Do they all agree? Do they provide ways for different agencies to check identities against their registries? If so, how do they match information in a citizenship-check request against their internal systems? By name? If so, how do they handle different name spellings (marriages, name changes, present/omitted middle names, non-ASCII)? By some other identifier? If so, how do they validate uniqueness of that identifier (SSNs are not secure/are widely leaked for tens of millions of people, addresses change and can have multiple residents, not everyone has a passport number, state-issued IDs/drivers licenses aren't stored centrally by the federal government)? If a check-requested identifier is invalid, can they tell whoever requested the check why it's invalid? Do these validation requests happen in real time/one at a time, or periodically in batches? Do the people sending the validation requests have any contact at all with the people providing information about why unsuccessful requests failed?
I've worked on these systems--human and technical. It's hard even for a functioning, outcome-focused, centralized government. In this problem domain, the US federal government is none of those things, and has not been for many decades (or ever, in some areas).
Sure, some of the issues are politically-caused (one party has an incentive to not fix problems that privilege their agenda), but most of them are accumulated failures with no malicious agenda as the cause.
I know this was mostly glib, but it really doesn't work that way. There aren't centralized data repositories that even can be joined, in many cases. Even when they could be (by batch/paper-form request/extremely slow system integration) joined conceptually, many decades of inertia, law, regulation, and political opposition often prevent those interconnections from existing. Even when they are permitted to exist, they're usually implemented in extremely broken ways.
And plenty of that headwind is not coming from the "party of small government"! The refrain of "the government should not have centralized data it can use to infringe on my rights" often transcends party, depending on what issue is at hand. That's sometimes a reasonable position to hold, but it definitely has a cost, especially when taken to extremes, or when make-citizen-services-work-better initiatives are framed as spying or whatnot.
Not really. In my country there's no need to do an initial registration, and there isn't any kind of "voter roll purging" or having to redo it every few years to make sure it is constant. It basically Just Works without ever having to think about it.
Letting the government know that you moved is primarily about them knowing where to send letters, and which types of municipality taxes to charge you. As a side-effect they'll also inform a few other parties like banks and insurance companies, and the voter roll update is just another one of those things which happens automatically. Nobody thinks about it like a "voter registration", the whole concept doesn't even exist.
Really does not sound dissimilar, though I do have to refer back to an earlier comment I made that this is entirely run by the States and so not everyone has the same experience that I do. The only notification I give to the government when I move is to update the address on my driver's license. This also updates my voter registration, and the city & county seem to get their information from the state databases anyway so I don't tell them anything at all.
I know, I was making fun of it. It's a "'no way to solve this', says only country which hasn't solved it yet" kind of problem which exists solely due to American exceptionalism.
one party says its rampant and cant prove it, they think the other party relies on non-citizens voting
the other party says its not rampant per say and resists all capability to prove it, because they think the solutions to proving legal voter status would be difficult for their citizen voters to accomplish
amusingly, the limited audits done always find improper votes for the first party, although nothing rampant
ironically, Commonwealth and European countries all have the voter status proving requirement that the first party is asking for, despite this being seen as an extremist right wing idea to be distanced from
in the US, it is accurate that any voter registration tweak has been used to decline legal voters ability to vote so the left - despite being more congruent ideals with the rest of the developed world - does have unique considerations and skepticism
The Commonwealth and European countries make it easy to prove voting eligibility though. That's why it's not a crazy idea there. In the US every single time it's tried there end up being crazy manipulative requirements. E.g. gun permit (no photo) being a valid voter ID but student ID (with photo) not, because they want gun owners to vote more (as they vote republican) and students less (as they vote democrat), and of course there's no universal ID card like in European countries.
I think you’re discounting how much historical and cultural imperatives influence the electoral zeitgeist.
Like Germany being touchy tracking religious affiliations post WWII, post civil-war America is touchy about voter supression - im specifically referencing post civil war voter suppression conducted in what was then a Democrat stronghold in the American South.
Many argue that shame has never gone away and is still being conducted today through modern tactics.
Many would argue such a shame should never be dismissed at all.
No, studies have been done, and routinely show that non-citizen voting in election accounts for a pittance of the vote (e.g., "A study of 2016 data by Brennan Center for Justice from 42 jurisdictions found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast (or .0001% of votes)"); historical data of prosecution of non-citizen voters agrees with the studies, similarly showing it to be non-issue.
There is evidence, the "one party" routinely presents it. This isn't some "both sides" issue.
> the other party […thinks] the solutions to proving legal voter status would be difficult for their citizen voters to accomplish
Yes, because they would. The GOP's proposed "SAVE Act", which was pushed directly by Trump, for example, would have (effectively) required most citizens to present passports as proof of citizenship. (And further, to obtain a passport, since most Americans do not have one.) (Among other problems with the bill.)
(And just to note, since there is some non-US in the thread: you have to be a citizen to register to vote, and — though this is handled on a state by state basis, but I do not think any state deviates here — you must prove that already at registration. The ongoing debate above simply makes that harder to do.)
>No, studies have been done, and routinely show that non-citizen voting in election accounts for a pittance of the vote (e.g., "A study of 2016 data by Brennan Center for Justice from 42 jurisdictions found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast (or .0001% of votes)"); historical data of prosecution of non-citizen voters agrees with the studies, similarly showing it to be non-issue.
Forget about the Brennan Center's single year audit. The Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Database[0] goes back 40+ years to 1982.
In those 40+ years, they have documented less than 2,000 cases of voter fraud, with more than 1,500,000,000 votes being cast within that time frame.
That's a voter fraud rate of 0.0001333%. And even if we (without evidence), claim that the amount of fraud is 10x (0.001333%) or even 100x (0.01333%)higher and just not detected, despite the presence of observers from all involved parties at all the polls/counting stations in all of the 3500+ separate elections[1] that take place in the US yearly.
The rate of fraudulent votes isn't high enough to impact the outcome of elections, even if we say that there's 100x more voter fraud than the folks who scream voter fraud is everywhere!!! have detected.
It's a complete non-issue that's used by cynical folks to make it harder for their political opponents to vote. Which is disgusting, IMNSHO.
[1] Elections are managed at the county level (of which there are 3500+ in the US), although processes and procedures are often dictated by state governments.
The US doesn't have a population register in the same way as European countries do.
For reference, the Finnish voting experience is such that about a month before the election you get a card to your registered address, telling what the election is and what's your polling place. Then you show up on the day in question, show an ID, they check that against their list and off you go.
That system is ripe for abuse. The presidential election is usually (not always) decided by a few swing-states. It sure wouldn't be hard to fly a bunch of people in for a few days, put them up in hotels and feed them, give 'em a little bit of cash, so they go vote, as one example. So now you have to prove they live in, as you said, a community.
If you had said 'immigrants' instead of non-citizens you would have a stronger point. I don't have an issue with non-citizen immigrants voting. Part of the challenge is a.) proving someone exists and b.) proving they live in the district in which they voted. How do you solve this? Voter registration.
Ignoring all that, voting is both a right and privilege of citizenship. This can be revoked. As an example, convicted felons cannot vote.
The 15th Amendment says (note the word citizens):
> The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The 19th Amendment then gave women the right to vote:
> The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
So, it is very much a law to be a citizen in order to vote.
As an aside, what if a non-citizen of an EU country was vacationing for a month in said EU country. Should they be able to vote? Of course not.
> It sure wouldn't be hard to fly a bunch of people in for a few days
I didn't say no registration. Every US state has a residency requirement before you can register to vote. Get out of here with your disingenious hyperbolics.
>So, it is very much a law to be a citizen in order to vote.
Oh no I'm proposing changing the law, your quotes say nothing about limiting a non-citizen's ability to vote. I never argued about a right to vote for non-citizens. I took a very limited stance.
States have banned noncitizen voting for statewide elections for a century.
"While federal law does not prohibit noncitizens from voting in state or local elections, no state has allowed noncitizens to vote in statewide elections since Arkansas became the last state to outlaw noncitizen voting in state elections in 1926."
Nothing says the 1996 law can't be undone (as it's not an amendment), and states can permit noncitizen voting outside of the Federal context if they feel like it. That's Federalism for you.
Thats not how it works. You usually have a few places you can vote in, and there is a list of names that are checked, then you vote.
Its not like immigrant X from country Y can vote willy nilly.
This is not rocked science. Every citizen is automatically allowed to vote, and IF you cant vote where you are supposed to you can handle this case specially.
See, and here I thought that a democracy meant that everyone would get a vote!
So who gets to determine what counts as "some effort"? Is putting voter registration behind a Rube Goldberg machine enough, or should we go for an IQ test? How about sitting in a room for 72 consecutive hours before being able to cast your vote? Should we perhaps "grandfather in" people who have already proven to be trustworthy as well?
Voting is a fundamental human right. If politicians can make rules deciding who gets to vote, then those politicians will disenfranchise people voting for their opponents. The only solution is to make sure everyone can vote - including the "undesirables" like dumb people and prisoners.
Obvious example: you spelled "ought" wrong, this means that according to my arbitrary rules passed by a democratically-elected government you are not smart enough to vote. And no, you can't change the rules: you'd first have to elect a different government, which you can't do because you can't vote.
The federalist papers make it pretty clear the intention was not that everyone should vote. The idea of active citizens being the ones who vote is everywhere in Republicanism, whether you look at the early French Republic and their restrictions on the national guard, to constitutionalism in England, or the early American Republic. In Athens, not everyone got a vote. In Rome not everyone got a vote. In cities across Europe following the Magdeburg charter, not everyone got a vote. The original limitation of propertied people in the constitution was the correct move in hindsight. The issue with suffrage for those that are not active and giving a positive impact to the country is exactly what you see happening today, politicians pandering to certain voter groups with hand outs instead of sticking to principles.
> The federalist papers make it pretty clear the intention was not that everyone should vote.
If we're citing that sort of thing, I'm gonna go ahead and quote the Declaration of Independence, which should be at least as instructive as to intent.
The Federalist Papers are, after all, advocacy efforts (opeds, even) by three people, not policy decisions agreed upon and ratified by the states.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
"All men" and "the governed" seem like they could easily have said "landowners" if that were genuinely the intent.
(Nor should we necessarily be permanently bound to the opinions of people who predate germ theory.)
I posted an older article because I wanted the focus to be on the online registration system. According to a newer article, the number is easily in the tens of thousands [1].
Oregon auto atically registers you to vote when you get a license/ID, and has a pretty reliable mail in voting system. Other states interested in their constituents should do the same
They are really persistent, but it might still not be enough to prevent the democratic candidate from becoming senator, since the republican one is so odious that plenty of reliable republican voters are signalling their intent to vote for the democrat as a come-to-jesus message to their own party.
So - we found a bug, are fixing it, and it will cause an extra load on the people sorting through the backlog. Seems like a system working as it should. Bugs happen, and it is this kind of situation which makes me glad individual states manage their own voting systems - a problem in one doesn’t impact everyone.
As a TX resident possibly affected by this, I for one am grateful for my neighbors at the local election office working hard to get this resolved.
It punishes large counties, who'll have to pay overtime or hire new employees to help with the sudden backlog, or risk leaving people in the county disenfranchised. Punishing cities is part of the Republican agenda. Whether this one is incompetence (seems likely) or intentional manipulation remains to be seen. But, it is certainly convenient for Republicans that it is most costly, and most likely disruptive, for the cities that don't vote for Republicans. Somehow, Travis and Harris counties, in particular, are always having to jump through extra hoops to make sure their voters are able to vote. And, sometimes, the things they'd like to do to make it easier to vote are outlawed by the state (e.g. Harris county, specifically, has limits on the number of ballot drop-off locations they can have, imposed by the state).
And, what would have happened had journalist not discovered it a couple of months before the election? Would those registrations have just been lost until after?
> Whether this one is incompetence (seems likely) or intentional manipulation
And that's the issue right? All your points on what could have happened are good points - but this really does seem like the kind of bug that shows up even in systems implemented by competent people. As the most likely interpretation, I'll give my neighbors the benefit of the doubt. If we can't trust our neighbors to (mostly) do the right thing, but suspect foul play for every hiccup, then our republic really does have a problem.
If we had evidence that it _was_ intentional sabotage, well then - this situation would look rather different. Probably worse than picante sauce from New York City [1].
If there was a long history of good faith efforts to make voting easy for every Texan, I would be more inclined to assume good faith. But, there have been many instances of Republicans putting their thumb on the scale to reduce the electoral power of cities, so, I am slower to assume something like this is an honest mistake.
It's a spectrum, not a binary. We're really far from the "packing bags and leaving the country" end where you're a slave to the state. America is nothing like an Iran or China where we have no power and no rights to overturn the state.
Let's see if any of these petty games helps Trump with midterms. I highly doubt it. Kalshi is already calling it a double win for Democrats.
The economic impact of the Iran War looks like it really cost Trump everything. And it's funny because he always campaigned on not getting into wars.
China doesn't seem that bad in most respects either. Only in freedom of speech, and resulting internet censorship, but in quality of life and in productivity they seem to be thoroughly pwning the USA.
But in China, the CCP literally determines which candidates can run for office. The TN GOP does not determine whether Democratic candidates can even run.
> Kalshi is already calling it a double win for Democrats.
It's quite common for Kalshi bets to go from <1% to 100% chance in minutes when news breaks. "Prediction markets" is almost Orwellian in its inaccuracy.
> We're really far from the packing bags and leaving the country end.
Some of my American friends in Canada have taken in American friends who left so quick they didn't have a long-term place to land yet. Whether you have packed your bags and left, that depends who you are. It's not a flood, but an exodus has begun amongst those whose lives have been disrupted: academics, trans, queer, etc
The judge's decision was not a free speech argument, but a due process one. Rights were taken away without warning, or opportunity to argue or appeal. That sounds like arbitrary executive rule.
Their right not to have punitive actions taken against them by the government for their speech, as clearly protected by the First Amendment. But you knew that.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Special access is not freedom of speech, or any media org that already wasn't allowed into the White House press briefings could be said to have had their First Amendment rights violated. But you knew that.
> We think that notice to the unsuccessful applicant of the factual bases for denial with an opportunity to rebut is a minimum prerequisite for ensuring that the denial is indeed in furtherance of Presidential protection, rather than based on arbitrary or less than compelling reasons.
Similarly, not credentialing an incidentally Jewish reporter wouldn’t be a violation. But removing their pass for being Jewish later would be.
I was always taught that the executive branch enforces the law, not interprets it. If the executive branch or legislative branches disagree with the judicial branch, then they have the responsibility to appeal or deal with it; they can't just ignore it because they disagree.
It turns out that in the end, enforcement is the only thing that matters. Written law doesn't matter, and interpretation doesn't matter, except insofar as they affect enforcement.
Perhaps the next president will wave the magic executive order wand and reduce the age of eligibility for Medicare to zero. Or something else equally spicy and very progressive. Republicans used to understand that eventually the other side will win an election and do unto you everything you have done unto them, but apparently the current crop thinks they will be ruling forever.
Contrary to popular belief, executive orders aren't laws and don't have the force of law. An executive order couldn't legally reduce the age of eligibility for Medicare.
The only reason Trump gets away with it is because Congress is complicit in the authoritarian fiction of the President's "plenary authority" even to the point of obviously illegal things like undermining budget allocations and not doing their actual jobs.
As soon as a Democrat gets in, Congress will miraculously become pedantic sticklers to the rules. This kind of corruption and blatant malfeasance is something only Republicans get away with, at least in the modern era.
With a big enough blue wave in 2026 and 2028, congress may be willing to turn a blind eye to a Democratic president doing extralegal things. I will not be shocked if this genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Throughout my life Republicans have been more creative about bending the rules, but the Democrats have reliably learned how to copy their game each time.
And SCOTUS, who deemed Biden's loan forgiveness an abuse of power, but not Trump's attempt to wipe out the entire department.
Dems keep losing, in part, because they're following the rules the other team is openly flouting. There's no real pleasant answer to that in any direction.
And I think it is entirely plausible that Dems are quickly concluding that if they continue to be the only ones following the rules, they may never win another election. I think we may be in for a rough ride.
When I first registered in Texas, they told me that something didn’t match the details with Social Security and that they couldn’t process my registration. Unfortunately, they never told me exactly what didn’t match. After chasing Social Security and the county multiple times, I eventually figured out that someone had put an extra space in my middle name. The staff processing my request were very helpful, but unfortunately, they didn’t even know what exactly was not matching.
It’s really unfortunate that you have the burden of proving that your information is correct. It took me about 6/7 weeks to complete the entire process.
They also mail you a voter registration card (which itself isn’t useful anywhere), and if, for any reason, it doesn’t reach you, your name will be suspended from the list.
The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
When corporations use similar tactics we call them “dark patterns”. Unfortunately, the only weapon we the people have against these tactics is regulation. But when it’s the government doing these things… anyway. Hope the Democratic Party has learned that conservative leadership won’t evolve their platform, they’ll reject democracy.
I'm not convinced the Democratic Party is capable of learning anything ever at all.
Or maybe I'm confusing incompetence with malice. Maybe they want to lose and be the spoiler party.
There’s a good number of sincere democrats who are being hamstrung by an aging and self-interested Democratic leadership.
The Democrat Party, as an organization, exists first and foremost to fundraise and the best way to do that is to seek corporate donors, thanks to Citizens United, since its easier to court one or two very large donations than hundreds or thousands of small individual donors.
What happens politically and the resultant laws are basically secondary. You, the taxpayer, doesn’t pay the DNC to do its job. Donors do.
>The Democrat Party, as an organization
It's the Democratic Party.
By purposely misnaming it, you are making it clear that your take is a dismissive and biased one.
But you don't need me to tell you that -- it's your whole point.
literally nobody cares what the official title of the party is, which is why they post wrong titles. We all know which one is meant and you're being pointlessly obtuse.
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I mean - as much as it's the "better" of the two options right now... the modern democratic party is still a center-right party controlled mostly by corporate interests and lobbying money.
They favor keeping the system that is producing rampant inequity stable. With a laissez faire approach to social issues.
As opposed to republicans, who favor socially regressive and oppressive policies, double speak, and who's mantra is mostly "Don't get caught. But if you do get caught - deny, deflect, denounce" rather than anything resembling ethical behavior.
Neither of them are particularly good options for governance. They have no motivations to "learn" anything.
One is a fast moving, malignant cancer - the other a slow moving auto-immune disease. Both kill the host.
We desperately need fresh air.
We need to push for ranked choice voting. It's the best way out of this hole we've dug.
I generally agree with this.
Personally, I'd also like to see party influence removed from elections. Completely removed at the time of actual election (ex - absolutely not allowed to list party on the ballot) but also reduced at the primary level (ex - no more closed primaries, maybe eliminate partisan primaries entirely).
Politics isn't a team sport with winners and losers, and this attitude (especially concerning given the recent moves by republican leaders to explicitly disenfranchise and withhold support for locations that trend democratic) is utterly reprehensible (which is fairly in theme with their overall moral character).
We're one nation. Politicians serve the populace, regardless of whether those people voted for them or not.
Why would either party agree to implement that?
Enough torches and pitchforks can accomplish a lot.
"The only weapon we the people have against these tactics is regulation"
That's not true. If it's a company doing it, you have the choice to not be a customer of the company. Don't give them any of your money if you don't like how they do business.
The same can't be said of government. If you don't give your money, in the form of taxes, you go to jail.
> That's not true. If it's a company doing it, you have the choice to not be a customer of the company.
Ah yes, 2026 America, famous for its wealth of commercial competition and diversity of business practices. Just the other day I was bragging to my friends how many reasonable options I have for so many of my critical necessities, including televisions and other cheap plastic cheap manufactured in China and white-labeled by glorified dropshippers.
The corporations are quickly becoming the government you are so quick to demonize. The death panels that FoxNews spoke about 24/7 back in 2010 are now embedded into our insurance industry, except you have no democratic recourse and will be statistically drained of your wealth before your offspring have a chance to inherit it, all while they watch you die and stress over the Byzantine processes that are “economically efficient”.
That would be easier if the US economy wasn't entirely controlled by duopolies
Clearly, Luigi found a far more effective way.
Not really.
Luigi didn't trigger any sort of mass uprising against the elites, didn't inspire copycats or revolutionaries. No reform of insurance or pharma costs occurred, all of the problems he ostensibly opposed are still there. He just got arrested and became a meme for a while.
Meh, I think a lot of my people in my cohort are a lot more sympathetic towards people who lash out violently against the Kafkaesque capitalist system that many of us are suffering under. It also engrained a cultural understanding (in my cohort) that profit-seeking is not a shield of innocence: many agree that the leadership of United was inherently evil due to their business practices.
So, there has been a shift in our shared reality. Maybe not as significant as something like 9/11, but maybe an order of magnitude or two below it.
The weapon, ostensibly, in a democracy, is the ability to vote your leaders out.
a gun?
The government has bigger guns.
Against whom?
Only way to correctly vote on your ballot. Blow away hanging chads
Maybe that's because it is, maybe most people the current Texas leadership want to get votes from are not the ones that newly first register in Texas?
> The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
Possible, but I doubt it. I've worked on the systems that do things like ID correlation/verification on the backend. They're ... imagine the most broken possible implementation you've ever worked on, then imagine it worse, then imagine that it's maintained by entirely different contractors than the ones that built it, with minimal incentive for improvement.
That's most of government IT implementations, and has been for decades.
Even when specific systems in this area are implemented well, the regulatory/bureaucratic complexity of the government prevents them from being more than marginally useful at best. I expanded more on some of the concerns/issues in this area in an adjacent comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832393
Maybe that's the designed part? I mean, in lots of more "modern" countries (for the lack of better word), voting is basically showing up, presenting ID, then you can check for the results online yourself to see it registered properly, then that's it.
To me the whole system with voter registration and all other jazz, seems designed to indeed discourage people from voting. Why wouldn't you want it to be efficient and simple otherwise?
The system is designed to rely on fundamentally-flawed things like ID correlation and verification. Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.
> Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.
I have trouble believing that, given that the "design", such as it is, took place over many decades of inter-agency regulatory/technical wrangling and organic growth.
At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals. Sometimes those goals were "make sure everyone eligible can vote as easily as possible"--and that's laudable! But more often the goals were "build $niche_system_component to comply with $specific_regulation". The number of times, during the design phase, where the people planning actually wanted to suppress votes and were empowered to make a part of the system actually do that was probably a rounding error compared to times when people fully accidentally moved the system in that direction due to bureaucratic myopia and shitty implementation.
I'm all for blaming political actors for things they intentionally do that are bad! Defunding the EPA? Bad! Getting into stupid wars? Bad! Banning mail-in voting? Bad! People with power and pre-meditated goals did those things, and many more, and should be opposed for it.
But "voting system is broken due to bureaucratic inter-operation failures, and state government staff have to do a postmortem and data recovery (ballot reprocessing)" isn't one of those times.
> At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals.
Until 2013, some states were under Federal preclearance rules because those "totally different goals" were historically "don't let black people vote".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_v._Holder
Yeah! And that's bad!
But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".
The malicious-officials problem has fixes like "vote people out" and "decommission harmful programs" and "restore cut funding".
The busted-data-system problem has fixes like "national ID card system" or "remove regulations preventing effective data sharing" or "hold system implementors responsible for failures".
If you see the disenfranchisement/conspiracy of the former in the bureaucratic/tech debt of the latter, you'll fix the wrong problems in the wrong ways, and make things worse.
> But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".
The problem is when "oops we did a little oopsiefuckup" starts to look like a deliberate pattern to cause chaos.
American bureaucracy developed differently from European bureaucracy. In Europe countries developed very centralised governments who found it useful to track their citizens. Borders mattered (to the exact m²) and armies of conscripts needed to be raised. They needed to know exactly how many 20 year old men there were and where they lived. Chaos was not an option.
That's only possible in countries with completely broken citizen IDs (like the US and the UK). Of course correlation is messy and broken and it's not used in other countries. It's also intentional because every attempt at fixing gets stopped or even backtracked.
In other countries citizens have IDs, and the ID can be sometimes wrong (ask me how I know, although that was back in the paper era) and that's the one thing that needs to be fixed. Once the ID is correct, everything works, because that's the single source of truth after that.
> The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
“the purpose of a system is what it does”
>The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
Now you get it.
> The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
It is, with specific emphasis on discouraging people in cities from voting. The state has done all sorts of fuckery to limit the ability of people in urban centers from having any voice in government. Some of the most incredible gerrymanders in the country, limits on voting locations and times imposed specifically on large cities, many small frictions to make voting more time-consuming and expensive.
It's why they can get away with naked corruption and bumbling incompetence and still retain a firm hold on power. Well, that, and copious oil billionaire money flowing to Texas elections.
the entire concept of "voter registration" (and associated shenanigans) is so alien to my European brain that I fail to see any reason why the richest country in the world does things this way other than voter suppression. What am I missing?
It's a distinct blue/red state issue. Blue states go out of their way to register as many of their residents as possible and allow same day registration.
The red states, Republicans use it as a tool to reduce participation of urban, non-white voters and reduce overall participation. They don't consider systematic, passive voter suppression techniques to be voter fraud.
Outside of the US spectrum, there are countries that require all citizens to vote or face fines (Peru for example). I find this interesting, because it's so out of sample compared to the typical political fights within the US about voter registration.
> Outside of the US spectrum, there are countries that require all citizens to vote or face fines (Peru for example).
Right, but even for Peruvians, you show up at the both, make your vote and leave, that's it. No thresholds for registering or other stuff, just you and your ID making a vote, even when outside the country. It again makes the US system seem intentionally designed to make less people vote.
This is also seen in the actual voting process itself. Stories about Americans having to stand in the scorching sun for hours are just absolutely mind-boggling to me: you should expect everyone to vote, and provide enough capacity for everyone to cast a vote during their daily commute or grocery trip without a significant delay!
If a bunch of politicians can make voting quasi-impossible for certain groups of people by meddling with their polling stations, then you don't have a functioning democracy.
Australia has both compulsory voting, like Peru, and a separate electoral roll that you have to (and must) apply to get on, like the US. It's not a US thing, it's a common law anglosphere thing.
Wow, this feels like the worst of both worlds. You have to do it, and you need to jump through hoops. Feels like US federal tax system.
Hoops? It's easy: https://www.aec.gov.au/enrol/#need
A website to register doesn't prove it's easy. Texas has one of those too, but obviously it's not proof of it being easy since we're here discussing it.
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it's actually easy in Australia. That still doesn't really explain why it's necessary.
It's necessary because we have elections with geographically based electorates, so your address determines which ballot you should receive (and so they know how to fairly resize the electorates). So you need to tell them somehow where you live. Also, the roll of voters has to be printed out many times to use at "check-in" on voting day, so you need to tell them in advance of this printing. They need consistent rolls because after the election they reconcile the various copies after the election to question/fine people who either didn't vote or voted more than once.
For people not on the roll, there is a special secondary method of voting called a declaration vote that allows you e.g. to vote even if you haven't enrolled. But this process wouldn't scale very well - these votes aren't counted for days after as they need to check the details you declared - and is intended as a safety net.
This seems a bit like Chesterton's fence...
I'm not sure it's strictly red state/blue state. I've live in Massachusetts and Minnesota for a while, where they made it very easy to vote so that tracks.
However, now I live in New York, where they seem to go out of their way to make it difficult. The registration cutoff is several weeks before the election and for at least one election, I found myself wrongfully expunged from the voter roles.
I think it may just be how corrupt the state government is.
It's the price paid for not having a general population register. You only need to enroll to vote if you want to vote, and the voter registration is (theoretically) only for that purpose and won't be used for other purposes. Every government interaction in the anglosphere works this way; you always have to reprove your id and address from scratch.
More specifically, it pretends it doesn't have a general population register. In reality there is a nearly 1:1 match between citizens and SSNs, but everyone just pretends it doesn't exist for political reasons. The fact that the USA was ever able to do a draft is another obvious counterexample.
It's not really a 1:1 match. Any foreigner who has ever worked in the US has one too (me included). Plus voter registration also covers subnational elections, which SSN data would not help with.
Re: the draft - if you are eligible for it you have to register to it, just like voter registration except it's mandatory. If you don't register for selective service you can't get federal college loans IIRC. You also have to register for the draft to apply for a green card?
If you are a non citizen, you should have "Not valid for work without authorization" written on your social security card. The social security administration knows who is and isn't a citizen because it's the part of the government that's reviewed the paperwork you have proving your status (birth certificate, naturalization document, work authorization etc).
(When you become of US citizen one of the first tasks is to take your naturalization document to your local SSA office so that they can update your file and issue you a new card without the notice)
The only citizens who aren't in the social security database are people who were never registered at birth, either because their parents didn't tick the box when registering or they were born overseas and their parents never registered the birth with the US government. Both can easily get registered via their birth certificate.
Everyone else in the system has already provided documentation to verify their status one way or the other.
The draft also requires registration (I believe to this day, 18 year old males are required to register?), but unlike voter registration, they never "forget" to send it in, or "fail" to do it, or incorrectly "purge" the draft list.
The European population registers are as bad as voter registration btw and as manipulated. I'm currently not registered (which is illegal) as I've been purged from the population register and due to similar bureaucratic excuses, can't re-register. Fortunately it's usually irrelevant, but I have no doubt some government department is bending statistics in its favor by excluding a group of people that includes me.
In my country the main registration fraud is tax fraud, as different municipalities have different tax rates so some people claim to live in a low-tax one while really living elsewhere. But it is also technically voter fraud since the two are linked.
American Democracy started from a place of very strict voter requirements (white, male, adult, landowner) and is trending towards fewer voter requirements.
The registration process is mostly a legacy system to ensure only qualified individuals vote, left over from a time when the bar was much higher.
The "male" bar is not "higher bar". It is just a suppression of rights of half the population. Sake with white.
And frankly, similat to "landowner". You arw simply biasing it toward slaveowners and their class.
Pretty sure countries in Europe have voter registration too? Here's a page to register in France. [1]
The US was organized around a very limited federal government (this has changed over time). Each state is responsible for elections within the state. There's no exact national registry of citizens, although Social Security keeps a de facto registry as most citizens are enumerated by that administration and their records include citizenship indication. Strictly speaking, registration with social security is not mandatory, it is required for employees and a child must be registered to qualify for tax credits and it makes administrative tasks simpler.
Within each state, voting is typically administered by county (or similar level) offices; although I think many states have a state wide process to register.
A given voter will vote for many positions (and often some propositions), and electoral boundaries for positions don't necessarily align with anything else or each other. So there's a lot of complexity there.
The residence address of the voter is the important thing that decides which elections they can participate in, but since there is no real registry of residence (de facto or de jure), it needs to be collected seperately.
[1] https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/R1...
Since the motor voter bills in the 90s. Most US states handle voter registration via the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). When you apply for your license or renew you tick the box and it automatically registers you.
The drivers license database is the defaco registry of where you live and most states require you to update your address within 2 weeks of moving (although enforcement is loose). There is a state identification card for those who don't drive that fulfills the same purpose as a drivers license.
Since RealID states now have to check immigration status if you request a RealID license (some states will issue non-RealID drivers licenses to the undocumented). There is a further Enhanced ID check that some states do that will indicate that you are a US citizen on the license. RealID and non RealID licenses are clearly marked.
Basically true voter fraud is largely a non issue because the States generally have their systems together. Voter suppression, which is the goal of most of the voting related legislation of the last 20 years, is however rampant.
You're not missing anything.
Being "the richest country in the world", sharing a land border with a much poorer country, has resulted in a population of people who are legally not allowed to reside in the country (whatever you want to call them according to your political affiliation; one side uses a term rooted in their legal status, while the other side uses a term intended to suggest that their inability to produce evidence of legal residence might be for some other benign reason) that is well into seven figures by all credible estimates.
Such people are, of course, not supposed to be allowed to vote in federal elections (18 U.S.C. § 611 , but also just common sense). Voter registration represents one way to detect if someone who has illegally entered the country (and it is common knowledge that one of the two major parties treats such individuals far more favourably than the other) is trying to vote.
It's also, as you were told, seen in France and possibly other European countries; and here in Canada as well — in all these cases, despite the lack of the above problem. It seems to me like an entirely normal thing and I can't really fathom why people would object to it so strenuously. Not everyone is allowed to vote (generally children are not; incarcerated criminals are not in many countries other than the US, including Mexico, Japan and the UK, as well as Australia and NZ on longer sentences; again there is the matter of illegal immigration; in fact, a quick check indicates that non-citizen legal immigrants are not allowed to vote federally hardly anywhere); given the importance of the vote, why would you not want these simple procedures to ensure that voting is done only by those allowed to?
my country (Italy) is also full of immigrants, but it's not a huge problem.
Once I turned 18 I was automatically enrolled in the voting registries, as was everybody else once they got the requirements (18 years, citizenship, no pending penal law issues, etc). While there have been small scale issues, I've never heard of tens of thousands of people purged erroneously from the registries (while it is a regular occurrence in the USA), and no one I know has ever had to do something to be eligible to vote once they had the requirements. I'm sure it happens that people for whatever reason are not automatically registered, but it's not a common occurrence at all.
> given the importance of the vote, why would you not want these simple procedures to ensure that voting is done only by those allowed to
because these simple procedures are not necessary to achieve that objective
Holdover beliefs from back when only White, male, landowners could vote.
These tactics don't work as well if you are a homeowner that has stayed in the same (gerrymandered) area for an extended length of time.
The model was conceived when there were wide plain, few people and traveling messaging results took days to weeks. And it was never adapted. I'd say most of European voting was with shorter distances, higher population density and newer technology.
> so alien to my European brain
Voter registration is mandatory in France.
It's not mandatory in the UK, but it's pretty frictionless. The only downside is that the data is sold commercially.
Conservatives attempted to copy the US voter ID requirements, but without realizing that the underlying demographic distribution of ID is different, and besides you can just postal vote anyway.
do people regularly get purged from voting registries in France?
You aren't missing anything, it's almost all about voter suppression, and a lot of that is about racism.
And it isn't even a secret. You can find quotes where politicians talk openly about it. I'm trying to be neutral here but when I say "politicians" I mean within one party.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/when...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/inside-house-republicans-pl...
https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/historyvotersuppression/web...
Since my previous iteration of the comment was completely illegitimately flagged, here it is again:
> I read your Fox News article. It does not even remotely establish anything like "talking openly" about "racism". In fact, it explicitly portrays the "politicians" in question advocating for "a proof of citizenship mandate for the voter registration process, and a nationwide photo ID rule to cast a ballot", and describing these as "really commonsense provisions", which they would be in countries that didn't form as an amalgamation of existing states (provinces, cantons, whatever you want to call them). All the arguments I've heard against this bill have been absurd, for example a canard about women supposedly not being able to prove their (entirely optional) name change when they get married.
This is a completely reasonable argument to make and it is completely unreasonable to try to suppress it, even if you disagree. If you believe there is something in the Fox News article that supports your claim, feel free to quote it. If "you can find" these quotes, show me some. Like, from within the last few years, not from the Goldwater era, please.
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I see that at least two people saw fit to downvote the above without comment.
I cannot fathom a legitimate reason why. Perhaps someone might care to, for example, quote the part of the article I overlooked, in which Republicans are supposedly openly discussing their supposed racist motivations for desiring "a proof of citizenship mandate for the voter registration process, and a nationwide photo ID rule to cast a ballot"? Or provide real evidence that the SAVE act would actually disenfranchise people who actually do have a legal right to vote? Or perhaps an argument for why the franchise should be extended to people whose presence within the American borders is already a violation of federal law?
Do you live in one of the European countries that has a registry of all citizens? At some point, the government needs to have some notion of who you are. The US has no central registry, so it gets pushed out to the periphery like this.
The Federal government has several central registries. The social security database for example knows which socials belong to citizens and which do not. The IRS database another as are the passport and visa databases.
The problem is that they aren't interconnected in any meaningful way by design so the bulk of the work gets pushed onto states. Real ID forced a lot of the states to get their act together but it's still a bit of a goat rodeo in places.
Just to add to this, not only does the federal government have, for example, SSNs, but, e.g., in my state, supplying a SSN (which then gets verified with the federal government by the state government) is one of the ways in which you can prove citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote.
There's also birth certificates, which are state-based databases, AFAIK, so there is that route too, and that process is more along the lines of how we're a federation.
(& for voter registration, probably the most common method, at least IME, is to bootstrap that from your state license/ID; since those are generally REAL IDs now, most individuals would provide birth cert and SSN, since that is the most broadly fulfillable requirement of REAL ID.)
I'd say it's more than a technical problem. The States have primary responsibility for regulating voting, and do not seem at all interested in handing that over to the federal government. Even if it is just to get access to databases (which I assume they already have anyway if they want it).
Yes, and Social Security number is used as universal identifier today because it's the only thing available, it was never intended as such. There's a long history of resistance to central data collection in the US.
None of those registries is comprehensive, even if they're literally all joined together, and the only one coming close to it SSA. IRS and passports is are particularly nasty ones to rely on because you'd systematically disenfranchise specific demographics like young adults, poor people, etc.
> my European brain
Do you speak for all of Europe? Or do different countries in Europe have different approaches to voting? What you are missing is that this is similar to the US in that we have fifty different States each of which handle voting their own way. There is no singular answer at the federal level, though some people are trying to push in that direction.
You think there’s no voter fraud in Europe?
Correct. In my country anyone is able to audit the process, and the only case of fraud was an instance of "granny farming" for local municipality elections - which after a full redo resulted in... exactly the same outcome.
Stopping voter fraud really isn't that difficult. Just don't over-complicate it with silly things like electronic voting machines or mass mail-in voting and there's not a lot that can go wrong.
With paper ballots or even an auditable paper trail from electronic voting machines, it's basically impossible to commit large-scale voter fraud, and every audit that I'm aware of in recent first-world elections has shown voter fraud to be a tiny number of votes at most.
We should be very, very wary of non-auditable electronic voting though.
voter fraud around here is mostly people buying votes, not so much having people registered who didn't have the requirements
Yes. Just like there is basically zero fraud in America. This isn't a problem. It is only for the dumbest people who believe Trump that 'millions of illegal immigrants voted' yet they haven't produced a single bit of evidence to prove it, but I'm sure it's real.
For context:
Illegal immigrant voted: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/colombian-national-plea...
6,600 noncitizens registered, 400 noncitizens voted, undisclosed how many, if any, are unlawfully in country: https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2026/6600-nonci...
from that source: a dmv program errored and registered some people to vote. So the government itself made the error. Out of 4 million voters in NJ, 400 ineligible people voted. And were caught. Oregon found 30 ineliglbe voters cast ballots. And were caught. Colorado, none were allowed to vote. In CA, 1.5k incorrectly registered voters _may_ have voted, and of those, _some_ might not have been US citizens.
This is the strongest evidence the nation can turn up on voter fraud. It sure looks to me that the system is catching the absolutely minuscule amount of non-voters voting and that voter fraud is mostly a non-issue.
It appears the more common voter fraud is a US citizen voting in elections outside their home residence. Like Ken Paxton, running for senate in TX, who it appears voted numerous times using his ex-wife's address, including to vote for himself.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/07/ken-paxton-voting-el...
To be fair, as was seen with Bush v. Gore a very small number of votes can change the entire political landscape. Something probably ought to be done about that as well.
It's bizarre to me that putting numbers on something with high quality citations gets downvoted like this.
And how many votes were cast? Did it impact the election in any way? It's a non-issue and we should be happy about that.
That's all in the cited sources. I didn't offer an opinion. I added contextual information related directly to your positions.
You deliberately left out facts to support your bias. 4,000,000 votes case. So 0.01%. If the election was that close a recount would be done anyway. It does not effect anything at all because our system is already solid and that's a good thing. There is no crisis. There are no major issues in this area. There are major issues with Texas closing down polling places in black neighborhoods but lets all pretend it's illegal voting.
I posted 2 sources. I did not post a comment. Take it up with the authors.
I explained this in a sibling comment to this one, but it's +4 points [flagged] because someone didn't like the explanation.
No, it was flagged because you said something untrue and unkind about your political outgroup. In fact, it is not just untrue, but something that said outgroup constantly clarifies to the point where the meme ("but they have to come legally") is a rallying cry. And to the point where many of their strongest voices are legal first or second generation immigrants.
I can literally prompt ChatGPT with
> What examples of American voter fraud (real or alleged) have been promoted in right-wing media within the last 28 days?
and find multiple results with considerable detail. If you want to hear anecdotes from ordinary people who've witnessed it (or at least had good reason for suspicion), it's not hard to find the right circles for that, either. But by its nature, few have access to the information that would be needed to evidence it properly.
More importantly, though, there are plenty of people who can point at how insecure the system is and how cheap and easy it would (or should) be to fix that. It's hard to understand how there can be such strenuous objection to fixing it if there is actually no problem. It's hard to understand how there can be so many people who are definitely following the law, but would face a hardship if expected to prove it even minimally.
Canadians must identify themselves in federal elections (https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...) and normally register in advance (https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=reg&do...) which is usually as simple as ticking a checkbox to give consent for the CRA (equivalent to IRS) to pass on your data to Elections Canada (which is independent of the government). None of this is even slightly controversial here; even our most left-wing parties (and the centre of gravity of our entire system is generally considered to be well to the left of the US's) are not trying to eliminate the requirement.
So we have 'anecdotes' from chat gpt. Totally valid.
Did you know that when you use ChatGPT for research, it gives you links for its citations automatically which you can then verify? I did this.
The Canadian comparison is apples to oranges when you look at and compare the ease of identification and registration (can register at the polls; a massive number of verification methods - vs - sometimes can't, very few verification methods)
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There’s a rich history of voter suppression tactics in the US. Naïve conservatives refuse to see the straight line from poll taxes to voter registration deadlines. Anti-democratic conservatives take great joy in continuing the racist and classist traditions of their forefathers (both by blood and by tradition), and you’ll find such characters packed in the state governments in the South.
> Naïve conservatives refuse to see the straight line from poll taxes to voter registration deadlines.
There is no such line. Of course the state and the people should be clear on who is and is not legally entitled to vote, in advance of actual voting. How could it be otherwise?
>How could it be otherwise?
I feel like acting like things are impossible which are done in other regions without issue is a losing argument, no?
What are you talking about? I made an "ought" claim, not an "is" one. No matter what democratic polity you're in, the government and the people should be aligned about who is and is not allowed to vote for that government. Otherwise you do not have anything that can be called a democracy.
Caught one! I jest. Probably.
Voter registration deadlines are a tool for paternalistic racists and classists to enforce their voter suppression agenda with the thinnest veil of plausible deniability. Here you are, declaring their denial as strictly plausible.
Maybe we could have voter registration deadlines if there weren't so many bad actors who use it as a tool for voter suppression, but apparently ~50% of US state governments can't be trusted with that responsibility.
Edit: that's actually the issue, inherently; many rules and requirements for voting sound reasonable when presented absent of the context of the entire history of the United States (especially in the apartheid South...), but there are literal neo-Klansmen who will twist and bend those rules into onerous requirements that make sure that only white wealthy people who live in certain zip codes and have plenty of flexibility in their schedule have an opportunity to vote.
And you fall for that trap with some sort of rationalist aloofness that's so common on this Silicon Valley technology forum. This is why being "woke" matters and the Trumpist campaign against historical literacy is critical to keeping certain states red. The historical literacy in some of these states is already abysmal (based on first-hand conversations), and to think it could get even worse...
What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
> there are literal neo-Klansmen who will twist and bend those rules into onerous requirements
The year is 2026, not 1956.
> And you fall for that trap with some sort of rationalist aloofness that's so common on this Silicon Valley technology forum.
It is not a "trap". It is what actually looking at actual evidence tells me.
By definition, "historical literacy" is something that tells you about what used to happen. This does not explain what currently happens.
What currently happens is explained by looking at contemporary evidence. I have, as a Canadian who constantly has to have these arguments because of the American cultural dominance of the Internet, looked into it quite a bit. It does not support your assertions.
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Surely the government already knows who is a citizen (otherwise it would not be able to stop noncitizens from registering), so surely it would be trivial for the government to use this list of citizens to send out ballots?
Citizen baby is born? Add them to the list of citizens. Citizen dies? Remove them from the list of citizens. Citizen moves? Have them inform their new municipality about their change of address - which they'll probably need to do anyways for tax and mail reasons.
> Surely the government already knows who is a citizen
No. There's a lot more nuance there than you'd think, in the "broken regulatory and technical processes" domain, not political issues.
Example questions with unsatisfactory (not "impossible to do well", just "broken due to decades of technical and regulatory debt") answers: what government agencies, plural, are the authority of who is a citizen? Do they all agree? Do they provide ways for different agencies to check identities against their registries? If so, how do they match information in a citizenship-check request against their internal systems? By name? If so, how do they handle different name spellings (marriages, name changes, present/omitted middle names, non-ASCII)? By some other identifier? If so, how do they validate uniqueness of that identifier (SSNs are not secure/are widely leaked for tens of millions of people, addresses change and can have multiple residents, not everyone has a passport number, state-issued IDs/drivers licenses aren't stored centrally by the federal government)? If a check-requested identifier is invalid, can they tell whoever requested the check why it's invalid? Do these validation requests happen in real time/one at a time, or periodically in batches? Do the people sending the validation requests have any contact at all with the people providing information about why unsuccessful requests failed?
I've worked on these systems--human and technical. It's hard even for a functioning, outcome-focused, centralized government. In this problem domain, the US federal government is none of those things, and has not been for many decades (or ever, in some areas).
Sure, some of the issues are politically-caused (one party has an incentive to not fix problems that privilege their agenda), but most of them are accumulated failures with no malicious agenda as the cause.
It does. However the party of small government doesn't believe in SQL joins between tables so kicks the problem down the states. ;)
I know this was mostly glib, but it really doesn't work that way. There aren't centralized data repositories that even can be joined, in many cases. Even when they could be (by batch/paper-form request/extremely slow system integration) joined conceptually, many decades of inertia, law, regulation, and political opposition often prevent those interconnections from existing. Even when they are permitted to exist, they're usually implemented in extremely broken ways.
And plenty of that headwind is not coming from the "party of small government"! The refrain of "the government should not have centralized data it can use to infringe on my rights" often transcends party, depending on what issue is at hand. That's sometimes a reasonable position to hold, but it definitely has a cost, especially when taken to extremes, or when make-citizen-services-work-better initiatives are framed as spying or whatnot.
> Citizen moves? Have them inform their new municipality about their change of address
That is exactly what voter registration is?
Not really. In my country there's no need to do an initial registration, and there isn't any kind of "voter roll purging" or having to redo it every few years to make sure it is constant. It basically Just Works without ever having to think about it.
Letting the government know that you moved is primarily about them knowing where to send letters, and which types of municipality taxes to charge you. As a side-effect they'll also inform a few other parties like banks and insurance companies, and the voter roll update is just another one of those things which happens automatically. Nobody thinks about it like a "voter registration", the whole concept doesn't even exist.
Really does not sound dissimilar, though I do have to refer back to an earlier comment I made that this is entirely run by the States and so not everyone has the same experience that I do. The only notification I give to the government when I move is to update the address on my driver's license. This also updates my voter registration, and the city & county seem to get their information from the state databases anyway so I don't tell them anything at all.
Wait until you hear about all the dead people receiving benefits.
But seriously, your assumptions about how the USA works are just wrong. Voting is not handled at the federal level. Citizenship is.
I know, I was making fun of it. It's a "'no way to solve this', says only country which hasn't solved it yet" kind of problem which exists solely due to American exceptionalism.
Are the non-citizen voters in the room with us right now?
Yes, it's next to the 90 deals in 90 days, lower prices and no new wars.
I'm confused by your flippancy, are you suggesting it doesn't happen?
one party says its rampant and cant prove it, they think the other party relies on non-citizens voting
the other party says its not rampant per say and resists all capability to prove it, because they think the solutions to proving legal voter status would be difficult for their citizen voters to accomplish
amusingly, the limited audits done always find improper votes for the first party, although nothing rampant
ironically, Commonwealth and European countries all have the voter status proving requirement that the first party is asking for, despite this being seen as an extremist right wing idea to be distanced from
in the US, it is accurate that any voter registration tweak has been used to decline legal voters ability to vote so the left - despite being more congruent ideals with the rest of the developed world - does have unique considerations and skepticism
did I miss anything?
The Commonwealth and European countries make it easy to prove voting eligibility though. That's why it's not a crazy idea there. In the US every single time it's tried there end up being crazy manipulative requirements. E.g. gun permit (no photo) being a valid voter ID but student ID (with photo) not, because they want gun owners to vote more (as they vote republican) and students less (as they vote democrat), and of course there's no universal ID card like in European countries.
I think you’re discounting how much historical and cultural imperatives influence the electoral zeitgeist.
Like Germany being touchy tracking religious affiliations post WWII, post civil-war America is touchy about voter supression - im specifically referencing post civil war voter suppression conducted in what was then a Democrat stronghold in the American South.
Many argue that shame has never gone away and is still being conducted today through modern tactics.
Many would argue such a shame should never be dismissed at all.
I didn’t discount that at all
> it is accurate that any voter registration tweak has been used to decline legal voters ability to vote
Acknowledging voter suppression exists is an understated way to communicate the severity of cultural shock events that transform entire societies.
did I miss anything?
so consensus is, no. you just didn’t like the way I wrote it
> and resists all capability to prove it
No, studies have been done, and routinely show that non-citizen voting in election accounts for a pittance of the vote (e.g., "A study of 2016 data by Brennan Center for Justice from 42 jurisdictions found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast (or .0001% of votes)"); historical data of prosecution of non-citizen voters agrees with the studies, similarly showing it to be non-issue.
There is evidence, the "one party" routinely presents it. This isn't some "both sides" issue.
> the other party […thinks] the solutions to proving legal voter status would be difficult for their citizen voters to accomplish
Yes, because they would. The GOP's proposed "SAVE Act", which was pushed directly by Trump, for example, would have (effectively) required most citizens to present passports as proof of citizenship. (And further, to obtain a passport, since most Americans do not have one.) (Among other problems with the bill.)
(And just to note, since there is some non-US in the thread: you have to be a citizen to register to vote, and — though this is handled on a state by state basis, but I do not think any state deviates here — you must prove that already at registration. The ongoing debate above simply makes that harder to do.)
>No, studies have been done, and routinely show that non-citizen voting in election accounts for a pittance of the vote (e.g., "A study of 2016 data by Brennan Center for Justice from 42 jurisdictions found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast (or .0001% of votes)"); historical data of prosecution of non-citizen voters agrees with the studies, similarly showing it to be non-issue.
Forget about the Brennan Center's single year audit. The Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Database[0] goes back 40+ years to 1982.
In those 40+ years, they have documented less than 2,000 cases of voter fraud, with more than 1,500,000,000 votes being cast within that time frame.
That's a voter fraud rate of 0.0001333%. And even if we (without evidence), claim that the amount of fraud is 10x (0.001333%) or even 100x (0.01333%)higher and just not detected, despite the presence of observers from all involved parties at all the polls/counting stations in all of the 3500+ separate elections[1] that take place in the US yearly.
The rate of fraudulent votes isn't high enough to impact the outcome of elections, even if we say that there's 100x more voter fraud than the folks who scream voter fraud is everywhere!!! have detected.
It's a complete non-issue that's used by cynical folks to make it harder for their political opponents to vote. Which is disgusting, IMNSHO.
[0] https://electionfraud.heritage.org/search?case_type=All
[1] Elections are managed at the county level (of which there are 3500+ in the US), although processes and procedures are often dictated by state governments.
> resists all capability to prove it
No, they're satisfied with the existing proof. Which is pretty concrete.
Which doesn’t happen all that often and the government is probably aware of who is a citizen and who isn’t.
The US doesn't have a population register in the same way as European countries do.
For reference, the Finnish voting experience is such that about a month before the election you get a card to your registered address, telling what the election is and what's your polling place. Then you show up on the day in question, show an ID, they check that against their list and off you go.
Do you think other countries don't have 'non-citizens'?
why can't you do the process when you vote?
In about half of the States you can.
Why should non-citizens be excluded from voting? If the community they live in makes a democratic decision they should be included.
That system is ripe for abuse. The presidential election is usually (not always) decided by a few swing-states. It sure wouldn't be hard to fly a bunch of people in for a few days, put them up in hotels and feed them, give 'em a little bit of cash, so they go vote, as one example. So now you have to prove they live in, as you said, a community.
If you had said 'immigrants' instead of non-citizens you would have a stronger point. I don't have an issue with non-citizen immigrants voting. Part of the challenge is a.) proving someone exists and b.) proving they live in the district in which they voted. How do you solve this? Voter registration.
Ignoring all that, voting is both a right and privilege of citizenship. This can be revoked. As an example, convicted felons cannot vote.
The 15th Amendment says (note the word citizens):
> The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The 19th Amendment then gave women the right to vote:
> The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
So, it is very much a law to be a citizen in order to vote.
As an aside, what if a non-citizen of an EU country was vacationing for a month in said EU country. Should they be able to vote? Of course not.
> It sure wouldn't be hard to fly a bunch of people in for a few days
I didn't say no registration. Every US state has a residency requirement before you can register to vote. Get out of here with your disingenious hyperbolics.
>So, it is very much a law to be a citizen in order to vote.
Oh no I'm proposing changing the law, your quotes say nothing about limiting a non-citizen's ability to vote. I never argued about a right to vote for non-citizens. I took a very limited stance.
Simply because it's ripe for abuse. I would never expected to vote as a non permanent resident, any place I live.
I think otherwise. Let's put it to a vote. Hope you're a citizen.
Because of United States law.
Only since 1996, and even then only Federally.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/611
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_Immigration_Reform_and...
Maybe we can ask SCOTUS to overthrow it on the "history and tradition" test Dobbs & Bruen recently (ironically) created.
>Only since 1996, and even then only Federally.
States have banned noncitizen voting for statewide elections for a century.
"While federal law does not prohibit noncitizens from voting in state or local elections, no state has allowed noncitizens to vote in statewide elections since Arkansas became the last state to outlaw noncitizen voting in state elections in 1926."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizen_suffrage_in_the_Un...
Yep, they can do that.
Nothing says the 1996 law can't be undone (as it's not an amendment), and states can permit noncitizen voting outside of the Federal context if they feel like it. That's Federalism for you.
The iron-clad unchanging US law. Is it against the law for a city to let non-citizens vote on city proposals?
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That's a dodge; they said "non-citizens", not "illegal aliens".
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Thats not how it works. You usually have a few places you can vote in, and there is a list of names that are checked, then you vote.
Its not like immigrant X from country Y can vote willy nilly.
This is not rocked science. Every citizen is automatically allowed to vote, and IF you cant vote where you are supposed to you can handle this case specially.
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See, and here I thought that a democracy meant that everyone would get a vote!
So who gets to determine what counts as "some effort"? Is putting voter registration behind a Rube Goldberg machine enough, or should we go for an IQ test? How about sitting in a room for 72 consecutive hours before being able to cast your vote? Should we perhaps "grandfather in" people who have already proven to be trustworthy as well?
Voting is a fundamental human right. If politicians can make rules deciding who gets to vote, then those politicians will disenfranchise people voting for their opponents. The only solution is to make sure everyone can vote - including the "undesirables" like dumb people and prisoners.
Obvious example: you spelled "ought" wrong, this means that according to my arbitrary rules passed by a democratically-elected government you are not smart enough to vote. And no, you can't change the rules: you'd first have to elect a different government, which you can't do because you can't vote.
The federalist papers make it pretty clear the intention was not that everyone should vote. The idea of active citizens being the ones who vote is everywhere in Republicanism, whether you look at the early French Republic and their restrictions on the national guard, to constitutionalism in England, or the early American Republic. In Athens, not everyone got a vote. In Rome not everyone got a vote. In cities across Europe following the Magdeburg charter, not everyone got a vote. The original limitation of propertied people in the constitution was the correct move in hindsight. The issue with suffrage for those that are not active and giving a positive impact to the country is exactly what you see happening today, politicians pandering to certain voter groups with hand outs instead of sticking to principles.
> The federalist papers make it pretty clear the intention was not that everyone should vote.
If we're citing that sort of thing, I'm gonna go ahead and quote the Declaration of Independence, which should be at least as instructive as to intent.
The Federalist Papers are, after all, advocacy efforts (opeds, even) by three people, not policy decisions agreed upon and ratified by the states.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
"All men" and "the governed" seem like they could easily have said "landowners" if that were genuinely the intent.
(Nor should we necessarily be permanently bound to the opinions of people who predate germ theory.)
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I posted an older article because I wanted the focus to be on the online registration system. According to a newer article, the number is easily in the tens of thousands [1].
[1] https://www.votebeat.org/texas/2026/09/23/dps-error-backlogg...
TIL a great deal of voter registration in Texas still happens using paper forms: https://www.votebeat.org/texas/2024/10/28/voter-registration...
And apparently they sometimes get lost or processed incorrectly, leaving people disenfranchised.
Oregon auto atically registers you to vote when you get a license/ID, and has a pretty reliable mail in voting system. Other states interested in their constituents should do the same
It'll be the least shocking thing ever to find out this "error" disproportionately affected Democratic leaning districts.
They are really persistent, but it might still not be enough to prevent the democratic candidate from becoming senator, since the republican one is so odious that plenty of reliable republican voters are signalling their intent to vote for the democrat as a come-to-jesus message to their own party.
This wasn’t an error, it’s voter suppression.
Everything's bigger in Texas, including the corruption and incompetence of state government.
So - we found a bug, are fixing it, and it will cause an extra load on the people sorting through the backlog. Seems like a system working as it should. Bugs happen, and it is this kind of situation which makes me glad individual states manage their own voting systems - a problem in one doesn’t impact everyone.
As a TX resident possibly affected by this, I for one am grateful for my neighbors at the local election office working hard to get this resolved.
It punishes large counties, who'll have to pay overtime or hire new employees to help with the sudden backlog, or risk leaving people in the county disenfranchised. Punishing cities is part of the Republican agenda. Whether this one is incompetence (seems likely) or intentional manipulation remains to be seen. But, it is certainly convenient for Republicans that it is most costly, and most likely disruptive, for the cities that don't vote for Republicans. Somehow, Travis and Harris counties, in particular, are always having to jump through extra hoops to make sure their voters are able to vote. And, sometimes, the things they'd like to do to make it easier to vote are outlawed by the state (e.g. Harris county, specifically, has limits on the number of ballot drop-off locations they can have, imposed by the state).
And, what would have happened had journalist not discovered it a couple of months before the election? Would those registrations have just been lost until after?
> Whether this one is incompetence (seems likely) or intentional manipulation
And that's the issue right? All your points on what could have happened are good points - but this really does seem like the kind of bug that shows up even in systems implemented by competent people. As the most likely interpretation, I'll give my neighbors the benefit of the doubt. If we can't trust our neighbors to (mostly) do the right thing, but suspect foul play for every hiccup, then our republic really does have a problem.
If we had evidence that it _was_ intentional sabotage, well then - this situation would look rather different. Probably worse than picante sauce from New York City [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S828Y7Eais
If there was a long history of good faith efforts to make voting easy for every Texan, I would be more inclined to assume good faith. But, there have been many instances of Republicans putting their thumb on the scale to reduce the electoral power of cities, so, I am slower to assume something like this is an honest mistake.
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> A de-facto dictatorship.
It's a spectrum, not a binary. We're really far from the "packing bags and leaving the country" end where you're a slave to the state. America is nothing like an Iran or China where we have no power and no rights to overturn the state.
Let's see if any of these petty games helps Trump with midterms. I highly doubt it. Kalshi is already calling it a double win for Democrats.
The economic impact of the Iran War looks like it really cost Trump everything. And it's funny because he always campaigned on not getting into wars.
China doesn't seem that bad in most respects either. Only in freedom of speech, and resulting internet censorship, but in quality of life and in productivity they seem to be thoroughly pwning the USA.
Try voting the CCP out of power. Let me know how it goes.
Try voting the TN GOP out of power.
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/15/nx-s1-5822329/memphis-gerryma...
Both systems have strong benefits for incumbents.
Strong benefits, sure.
But in China, the CCP literally determines which candidates can run for office. The TN GOP does not determine whether Democratic candidates can even run.
> The TN GOP does not determine whether Democratic candidates can even run.
But it does largely determine if they can win.
Which is functionally identical.
The TN GOP and DNC (or whatever the equivalent is) together determine which candidates can run
Isn't there plenty of internal conflicts within the CCP? China does their main voting at their version of primaries.
sounds like you should go move there!
I get to live in Europe where there's both freedom and QoL at the cost of insane bureaucracy.
> Kalshi is already calling it a double win for Democrats.
It's quite common for Kalshi bets to go from <1% to 100% chance in minutes when news breaks. "Prediction markets" is almost Orwellian in its inaccuracy.
If that's the case you should really buy that <1%. You have a 50% chance of 100xing your money.
That would require these to be predictable.
Which is the precise problem with the "prediction" markets writ large. Some things just... aren't.
In what way is the outcome of a coin flip predictable?
It is fairly predictably binary, barring an odd experimental setup.
Versus, say, this sort of prediction market wisdom: https://imgur.com/a/pw5hW9x
> We're really far from... leaving the country
Are we now? https://trends.google.com/explore?q=how%2520to%2520emigrate&...
https://trends.google.com/explore?q=how%2520to%2520emigrate%...
Yeah
You added Pokemon and this proves....?
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> We're really far from the packing bags and leaving the country end.
Some of my American friends in Canada have taken in American friends who left so quick they didn't have a long-term place to land yet. Whether you have packed your bags and left, that depends who you are. It's not a flood, but an exodus has begun amongst those whose lives have been disrupted: academics, trans, queer, etc
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"the White House's legal challenge" is something they can certainly pursue, but they can't just ignore a judge's orders in the meantime.
> Judges are not all-powerful dictators.
No, but the three branches are (in theory) co-equal, which makes that also apply to said White House.
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Do you think only the President can personally arrest people?
Yes, Federal judges are part of the judicial branch.
The judge's decision was not a free speech argument, but a due process one. Rights were taken away without warning, or opportunity to argue or appeal. That sounds like arbitrary executive rule.
What rights were taken away?
Their right not to have punitive actions taken against them by the government for their speech, as clearly protected by the First Amendment. But you knew that.
First amendment:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Special access is not freedom of speech, or any media org that already wasn't allowed into the White House press briefings could be said to have had their First Amendment rights violated. But you knew that.
Yeah, no.
The why of things matters. There’s long standing precedent on this.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/569...
> We think that notice to the unsuccessful applicant of the factual bases for denial with an opportunity to rebut is a minimum prerequisite for ensuring that the denial is indeed in furtherance of Presidential protection, rather than based on arbitrary or less than compelling reasons.
Similarly, not credentialing an incidentally Jewish reporter wouldn’t be a violation. But removing their pass for being Jewish later would be.
I was always taught that the executive branch enforces the law, not interprets it. If the executive branch or legislative branches disagree with the judicial branch, then they have the responsibility to appeal or deal with it; they can't just ignore it because they disagree.
It turns out that in the end, enforcement is the only thing that matters. Written law doesn't matter, and interpretation doesn't matter, except insofar as they affect enforcement.
I think you should read and reread what you wrote here until you spot the irony
I'm pointing out the irony originally missed. Glad you noticed, or sort of.
You're still missing it. The irony: the president isn't an all-powerful dictator either.
Yes, I know.
It's incorrect in any case. The supreme court decreed him immune from prosecution (for "official acts", that is)
He is immune from prosecution. He can probably go stand in the press room door and get away with turning people away. His staffers are not.
Your argument is essentially that the Executive can ignore the Judicial branch, and the process of law, if they say they have a good reason.
Perhaps the next president will wave the magic executive order wand and reduce the age of eligibility for Medicare to zero. Or something else equally spicy and very progressive. Republicans used to understand that eventually the other side will win an election and do unto you everything you have done unto them, but apparently the current crop thinks they will be ruling forever.
Contrary to popular belief, executive orders aren't laws and don't have the force of law. An executive order couldn't legally reduce the age of eligibility for Medicare.
The only reason Trump gets away with it is because Congress is complicit in the authoritarian fiction of the President's "plenary authority" even to the point of obviously illegal things like undermining budget allocations and not doing their actual jobs.
As soon as a Democrat gets in, Congress will miraculously become pedantic sticklers to the rules. This kind of corruption and blatant malfeasance is something only Republicans get away with, at least in the modern era.
With a big enough blue wave in 2026 and 2028, congress may be willing to turn a blind eye to a Democratic president doing extralegal things. I will not be shocked if this genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Throughout my life Republicans have been more creative about bending the rules, but the Democrats have reliably learned how to copy their game each time.
> The only reason Trump gets away with it
The reason he gets away with it is because Obama was celebrated for doing the same thing[0].
[0] https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-...
Bro, Obama hasn't been President for a whole decade, you can stop blaming him for things. It's OK, he had two terms, he can't hurt you anymore.
I don't know why you're talking like this, but perhaps you should go back to the kids' table for a little longer.
And SCOTUS, who deemed Biden's loan forgiveness an abuse of power, but not Trump's attempt to wipe out the entire department.
Dems keep losing, in part, because they're following the rules the other team is openly flouting. There's no real pleasant answer to that in any direction.
And I think it is entirely plausible that Dems are quickly concluding that if they continue to be the only ones following the rules, they may never win another election. I think we may be in for a rough ride.