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?
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It sounds like you have automatic voter registration. We do not have that across the US
In the US, voter registration is handled by the state. They need to know that you are alive, over the age of 18, and some states don’t allow felons to vote. They also need to know where you live (so they know which congressional district you are in)
Most of the time, this is pretty easy. It just takes a simple trip to a website and you can also do it at the DMV when getting your driver’s license.
As a result of your voluntary registration, you become eligible to be called for jury duty.
A surprising number of Americans think that the only thing that keeps the government from sending ninja assassins to turn their pets gay is that the parts of the government that know where they live are different from the parts of the government that have the ninja assassins.
It is one of the American ways to spell “voter suppression”. Add an unnecessary step to the process to reduce the number of people who vote.
Generally the US government has a lot more information about who you are, where you live, and how much taxes you pay regardless of any physical ID. They get that information through tax info from your employer. Who gives the IRS your address, and personal ID information, as well as registers it with your birth certificate or government ID provided when you apply for the job. It’s why we could potentially just get IRS returns each year without having to do our own taxes, but don’t because of lobbying against the beurocracy.
So, generally the US government actually already knows enough about you for you to be able to turn up with whatever identifying info you have and vote. The problem is that politicians don’t actually want everyone to vote and instead place barriers to voting in order to keep people out of the process.
So, instead we have to manually register to vote and update our registration when we move (even though the info is already updated in a dozen other places, it doesn’t automatically populate with your new address). We also have to check our registry manually to make sure we haven’t been removed from the voter rolls each year due to, again, a lot of politicians wanting to reduce the number of voters.
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