Thread

1. agos · 1790263045 · focus · HN ↗

   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?

   1. wat10000 · 1790263695 · focus · HN ↗

      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.

      1. spiralpolitik · 1790264101 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. deathanatos · 1790266097 · focus · HN ↗

            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.)

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