With the big election in the USA coming closer, I often read the terms “registered voter” or appeals to “register to vote”. How does that work?
Here in Germany you simply get a letter a few weeks before each election, telling you which voting location you are assigned to and on the election day you simply go there, show your ID (Personalausweis) and you can vote.
Why isn’t it that easy in the USA?
In: Other
To be an optimist about it,
Not to get into the politics about it, but for me personally, it would be very easy for someone to vote as me before I unregistered myself.
My state has very lenient rules on voting, to the point of all I need to do is just tell them my name and address. I tell them this info, they look through their book and give me my personal sticker to use on the machine to register my unique vote. This is an acceptable amount of proof to show i am who i say i am. This would prevent most other people from being victims of impersonation.
For example:
How would they know if I had already voted or not? They could show up to vote and I already had, in which case they would be pulled aside to be required to show further proof and eventually be caught. Or if they saw someone that knew me and noticed they were impersonating me.
I admit my personal example is not common but I do believe it shows the faults in this system even though they are rare.
Everyone in my life knew I didn’t vote. Anyone that was extremist enough to steal my vote would be able to find my address and voting location (all of this is public knowledge). So the only thing truly preventing the people in my life from stealing my vote is guilt and potential punishments (things criminals don’t usually care about, especially politcal extremists).
So for me personally I just unregistered myself as a voter. If I ever feel the need to vote again in the future I can register again. In my example, if the only thing that changed was being automatically registered, perhaps there would be more instances of this but who knows. Now instead of my sticker just sitting in a binder every election with the possibility of some extremely rare occurrence of someone using it as their own, it’s just not in that binder anymore.
Once again there’s way more layers to this topic in America. I just chose to take the most optimistic approach to your question while still providing an honest example. Nothing in my example was false or exaggerated. I acknowledged it’s incredibly rare. This is such a heavily debated topic though that people tell me I’m lying or that it just can’t happen based on statistics. Keep in mind that the statistics are invisible unless people get caught.
And then you have many different views on how easy it should be to be able to register/vote because we want it to be secure but not secure enough that it prevents people from being able to do so.
So like I said many others chose to go into that side of it, but I tried my best to give you a different yet still honest side to it.
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