Edit/Update: It turns out that my last name has a capitol letter in the middle and they put a space in it. Thank god. I can actually vote this year.
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As a European, the whole registering to vote thing is honestly one of the wildest parts of the US elections to me. It's so unnecessary complicated and prone to errors/manipulation. I just have to show up with my ID, doesn't matter if it's for the EU parliament or the local city senate.
the sound bites you hear about voting are intentionally misleading: you have to show up with an id to vote here too and that's not where to controversy lies; but the soundbites are setup to make it sound like it is to engender the reaction you've shared.
the controversy is registering to vote; not voting; and the conservative states intentionally make registering as heavily bureaucratic as possible in the hopes of minimizing the number of people who can successfully finish to process of registration.
they've also dedicated hundreds of millions on dollars to understand and enact policies to keep the poor and minority groups from voting.
usually democrats sit back and let republicans openly do it, but sometimes democrats do it themselves; the democratic governor of california just made automatic voter registration illegal; just as the conservative states do.
So… I’m in Texas , been here a long time.
most ballot counts in the primaries and general are counted by secret software and hardware run by ultra conservative families the last 20 plus years. Recounts are not allowed and exit polls not used anymore because of unpredictability.
Nobody cares, no political party wants to change : not a topic in forums anywhere, even in conspiracy minded chat rooms, and it’s been this way forever ( since before 2000).
There is a ton of crazy that is ignored .
I’ve seen how the system works, I’ve been at the county chair level. Nobody will criticize it . There is a quiet culture of people knowing it’s invalid but decide to leave it be.
I see comments like this a lot. Most important and apparently most difficult for Europeans (and others but it's almost always Europeans) to understand is that the US is a very large country, made up of 50 semi-independent states, each with its own government and laws-- about many things, not just elections. So that's why things are more complex here--we're not a small monolithic nation with one single, centralized government and set of laws that apply to everyone no matter where in the country they live.
Each US State runs its own elections; a person obviously can't be allowed to vote in more than one state. Since people can move from one state to another at any time, and even have residences in more than one state at the same time (such as college students and well-off people), it's necessary to register with the state you will be voting in, so that you are officially able to vote in that state and no other.
You do realize some countries in Europe have federal governments (Germany for example), right? And then these completely independent countries are part of the EU which have EU elections. So you have federation within federation. Also, the EU has higher population than the USA. We don't even all speak the same language. We are allowed to move between EU countries whenever we like and have residence where we please.
I think its not Europeans that don't understand.
That's why it exists - to make it more inconvenient for people (especially in certain demographics) to vote.
Depends on the country though. In France you must be registered to vote (you're assigned a specific voting office). It's a single registration foe everything, not for each vote
Although the process is online, and takes like 5mins.
You also get a voting card, but it's technically optional, it just speeds up the process in the voting office.
Just want to add, in the US you'd don't have to register to vote each election/vote, just when you change address.
It's by design. We could make it easier, but certain groups benefit from making it difficult.
In conclusion, please send the UN to fix us
The OSCE reports are usually just shy of scathing. The US reaction to those missions ranges, as far as I'm aware, from being completely oblivious to it or its results to Sheriffs trying to arrest observers.
Well the reason is that there are state laws against outside observers, and no treaty giving any foreign government the ability to monitor. So they're just enforcing the laws, as they're supposed to.
Mind you I'm not saying the UN or any other nation is going to interfere, but seems really important to follow laws around voting to make sure the attitude of enforcement isn't lax.
I'm not too familiar with the specific legal status of the OSCE in American law, I bet there's a treaty or the other, but generally speaking a) you're a member and b) you regularly send out your own people as OSCE mission members into other countries to observe elections and c) Every member state gets observed (alongside non-member countries inviting the OSCE because it's a stamp of approval and can help stabilise democracies, establish trust in the procedures). Cursory observations are done for basically all elections that aren't strictly regional, more in-depth ones every couple of elections. It's democracies holding each other accountable.
If Bumfuck, TX, wants to make a statement against Canadians observing their elections that's their god-damned right but it's also the duty of Washington to shut them the fuck up. Not too filled-in on the details either but when you start arresting people with diplomatic passports accredited by the federal level I think you should maybe take a step back and make a phone call before deploying handcuffs.
Well you go ahead and find those treaties for me, since I've never gotten a result back from a search. And I'd like to believe but have no proof of that.
On the one hand, the UN making a resolution that they won't trust the results of the US elections would play right into the hands of what some MAGAs are saying.
But MAGAs then agreeing to any UN resolution, especially one that requires third party oversight...
I'd say the odds are even on this.
It's wild.
There are some local and state governments trying to pass automatic voter registration, but it's an uphill battle, not unlike most things that would generally benefit the public good in this country.
Even in California, we got automatic voter registration passed the legislature, only for the governor to veto it.
Just wild that something so fundamental to a functioning democracy is so divisive.
That's exactly why it's divisive. They don't want a functioning democracy.
...what the electorate consider a bug the politicians consider a feature...
There's never been a United States ID card, for... reasons. As a Californian, I could get a California ID card, at the same place I got my California Driver's License, if I didn't intend to drive. The forms have the option of adding Voter Registration using the same information (birth certificate, proof of residence) at the same time. But some states make it all much more complicated.
Passport seems like it sorta fits, but it's hardly universal.
Doesn't have your address on it though.
Yeah but we have voter id. And for some reason Americans think it is unreasonable to have to have a government issued ID as this would disenfranchise all the people that don't have an ID... Which I think is also weird. Just make IDs accessible to citizens at low costs and implement voterID across the board.
A certain political party benefits from low voter turnout. Which, coincidentally, also happens to be the party working to get Trump elected and shield him from the repercussions of his crimes.
Yeah. It's also not as if doing this now will be reasonable. It will be something that needs to be put into law including the affordable national ID and then worked towards over the course of a decade or something.
They could just make a government ID that is not mandatory. Much like a passport. And whoever holds a passport or a voluntary govt ID is automatically enabled to vote using their ID / passport, but then would still leave the choice of manually registering for voting for those who don't trust "the government" and don't want a govt ID
Why? The whole "illegals are voting" will be dead in the water. And requiring someone to be able to ID themselves using a government issued and official ID when performing stuff like voting is not weird. The whole convoluted show up with birth certificate yadda yadda is.
Yeah that's pretty much what I meant, sorry if I wasn't clear.
I just think in order to reduce the resistance against such a change, it might be good to still provide the "old" method with voter registration for anyone who doesn't want a government ID because of "muh freedoms".
That way, any normal citizen can just have a government ID and by identifying themselves be able to vote without further registration. Any citizen who doesn't want an ID can go through a voter registration process, same as today.
Imagine you moved countries, and were entitled to vote in both.
You have to tell the new country you exist there.
That's the most common failure mode in the US, when you move states or even counties and there's a miscommunication or lack of communication between where you came from and where you are. There is no top level federal voter database.
There are other issues, but this is the most common.
You don't vote at a federal level, you vote at a state level, for federal stuff. (And state/local stuff)
Are there people of voting age that are exempt from paying taxes? Because I'm pretty sure the federal government has a huge database of its citizens already through the IRS. People who became adults after the last tax season and people committing tax fraud would need to register manually once, but I don't think that's such a big risk.
As I said, federal government doesn't handle this. So the IRS is involved for several reasons.
I think for most people in the US when you move you have to get a new driver's license, and that process also lets you register to vote as an automatic bonus if you check a box saying you want it
Not every adult has a driver's licence.
True, and that is an issue, but I guess the main thing I'm getting at is that despite voter registration not being a unified system a majority of people moving between states aren't going to be deterred from registering by a Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth.
Some states have lifetime DL terms, while others are still ridiculously long.
That's true but I'm just explaining the potential problem.