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

[cellio]

There was recently an online discussion I read about why voter rolls are public information, and a number of commenters were of the opinion that the whole post-rolls-outside-polling-places-in-advance practice was to give the community a chance to see if there were invented names on it.

Oh, interesting! Doubly -- I've never seen the rolls posted like that, but you're right that if they're public, registration allows scrutiny that my proposal wouldn't. Think of the public service that could be done if the folks pursuing voter ID instead pursued validating already-public information.

ETA: Oh, I just thought of the other thing they wouldn't be able to do: mail the voters.

That never occurred to me because I do not recall ever having received official election-related mail (other than my voter-registration card). No notices of elections, no booklets -- heck, they don't even mail us the text of ballot initiatives or proposed (state) constitutional amendments. Most people vote just based on the one-liner summary that appears on the ballot, which is not neutrally written (cringe). (It's written by whoever wrote the legislation.) This year I've actually seen notices (with full text) in print newspapers, but if you don't get a newspaper this information is pull, not push.

ETA: I had to show my driver's license to get a library card here in Pittsburgh (Carnegie Library). You also have to show ID to fly anywhere in the US, though granted that's not an activity that's likely to be relevant to those of limited means.

[siderea]

I've never seen the rolls posted like that,

!!! I have no idea if we're still doing it; the last time I remember seeing that done for sure was a few years ago. Thing is, I'm no longer habituating any of my local polling places, so if they are posting them I'm not there to see it. The senior center a half-block down from techjob was a polling place (not mine) and I saw rolls posted there back when I worked there.

Back in 1990, I was walking back to my dorm from the grocery store, and saw the rolls posted at my polling place, which was a fire station. There were IIRC three names registered at my street address, which was a dorm of 45 beds and the housemaster's apartment. I... may have stomped around the dorm a bit explaining that people who didn't register to vote locally didn't get to whinge about the lack of unmetered onstreet parking around the dorm. (Last time I was through there before an election, I was pleased to see my old dorm well represented on the rolls.)

That never occurred to me because I do not recall ever having received official election-related mail (other than my voter-registration card). No notices of elections, no booklets -- heck, they don't even mail us the text of ballot initiatives or proposed (state) constitutional amendments. Most people vote just based on the one-liner summary that appears on the ballot, which is not neutrally written (cringe). (It's written by whoever wrote the legislation.) This year I've actually seen notices (with full text) in print newspapers, but if you don't get a newspaper this information is pull, not push.

Your state isn't doing a very good job at this democracy thing. :)

[cellio]

Your state isn't doing a very good job at this democracy thing. :)

Yeah. But somehow our elected representatives manage to send out "newsletters" (at taxpayer expense of course). No no, those couldn't possibly be thinly-veiled ads from incumbents; that would be illegal. They're just, you know, news. Well, words on paper, with suitable spin. Um...

[goljerp]

That's easy, though - you can spam the "newsletters" to all addresses within a district. Sending materials only to registered voters means you have to actually do a mail merge from your database. It could take days to set up the punch cards for that!

[goljerp]

It's a darn good thing that my local election board mails us booklets with our polling places, because they keep on changing! So far in the last 3 years, I think there have been 3 different polling places for us, and they keep on moving slightly further from our apartment. I shouldn't complain too much, because they're all within a few blocks of home. I guess it's due to living in a city where the election districts have been redrawn. (I can't just walk to a local polling place, because there are several polling places within a few blocks of home which aren't mine.)

On the other hand, there were complaints in NYC about a mailing which was a bit misleading (it said something like next state primary on the YYYth of XXXXX, but before that was another primary which I guess they weren't thinking of when they made the mailing?)

[siderea]

Think of the public service that could be done if the folks pursuing voter ID instead pursued validating already-public information.

Well, I don't think it would be a public service, and I don't think the folks pursuing voter ID are interested in performing a public service. The folks pursuing voter ID are claiming it's to prevent vote fraud, but I believe the argument is disingenuous. The real purpose of promulgating voter ID laws is to make voting more expensive and a hassle for a population of voters who are reliably Democratic. Voter ID prevents far more Democratic voters from voting than combing the rolls for invalid voter registrations does. I mean, sure, they could have an automated service against which they could run voter rolls to find people who registered fraudulently – it would be cheap and pretty easy – but that would turn up approximately nobody, because fraudulent registration is so vanishingly rare, and wouldn't actually be very effective at knocking registered Democrats out of the rolls. It doesn't actually do what they really want. So they pursue voter ID instead.