voter registration

[cellio]

With all the drives to get people registered to vote in time for the November election, and at least one state reportedly headed to court over deadlines (caused, apparently, by Columbus Day being a holiday), I've been wondering... why do we even need voter registration today? (Aside from preserving some government jobs, I mean.) What's wrong with saying: show up at the poll in your assigned location, show proof of citizenship and of residence, be checked against a list of people who can't vote (mainly people who've already voted, but I think felons can't vote?), and vote. Since voting is districted, election officials can make sure any no-vote list is distributed to the right places in advance -- no Internet connection required. From there, it's just checking that the person is in the right polling place and hasn't already been here. Nobody has to have done paperwork in advance; everybody who's eligible and wants to gets to vote. Wouldn't this enfranchise more voters than the current system?

(You already have to give your name when you show up to vote and be checked off the list, so there's no privacy issue that isn't already present.)

Comments

[eub.livejournal.com]

"Motor Voter" voting registration basically does what you're asking, gets whatever database lookups done behind the scenes without a person making a separate request. The problem is the Republican Party expects that if more people voted, they would lean Democrat.

That aside, why is there any voter registration to be done in any way, at the DMV or not? I imagine it as precalculation of the answer to "person X is eligible to vote in location Y" so it doesn't all have to be evaluated on Election Day. I don't know how much is involved in evaluating that, but even if it's pretty simple, it would be a challenge to design the backing database systems so that they can handle the unpredictable high loads at 99.999+%

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

"Show proof of residence and citizenship" = "require ID to vote"