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Comment by wbronitsky | Hacker News Reader

I think instead of framing this issue as "how easy would it be to re-register" we could instead ask "why should anyone have to register to vote at all?" In the US, voting is a right, which is something that cannot and should not be taken away. Invalidating voting registration, especially in a targeted way, is deplorable.

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In most democratic countries, voters are registered automatically. Requiring a manual registration step and placing maintenance of voter rolls in the hand of political appointees is just an invitation for shenanigans.

In addition, penalties are highly asymmetric. Denying an eligible voter their right to vote is virtually risk free. Casting a vote while being ineligible is subject to harsh punishments. Even with the current, political, process, government officials would think twice about illegally purging 20,000 voters if the penalty for that would be equivalent to the one for illegally casting 20,000 votes.

That’s actually a good argument for registering guns. I have to register for my voting rights, you have to register for your gun rights.

There would be an uproar if we regulated voting the same way we regulated guns. Imagine if everyone who smoked weed and voted was committing a felony (to name but one example). Imagine if states had laws saying you need to take a class, pay a hundred bucks and get the police chief's permission before you could vote. Imagine if there was a federal agency that could unilaterally make rules about voting. Imagine if polling places were required to keep records of who voted for what when. Imagine if certain cities and states all but required extensive political connections to get a voting license. Trust me, you really don't want to regulate voting the way we regulate guns. There's a reason people like to compare various gun laws to poll taxes.

Edit: The down vote to reply ratio indicates that what I am saying is factually correct yet inconvenient.

As we see from this very article, the outcome of making people register for their rights is to deny them their rights. Don't race to the bottom, we'll all just end up... at the bottom.

The idea would be to equate the two to get rid of voter registration. Really, it’s to demonstrate the absurdity of both positions.

The way you framed it made it appear the opposite.

Yeah, my bad. I don’t have a strong position either way. It just is a very good way to illustrate the hypocrisy of holding one position but not the other.

Registering to have, not registering the actual item. Same way you register to have to vote but you do not register the vote itself.

In my mind, the difficulty to do both should be equal, as making either more difficult than the other is suppressing the rights of a group to do which ever is more difficult.

Votes are definitely registered at the time they are cast.

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