the entire concept of "voter registration" (and associated shenanigans) is so alien to my European brain that I fail to see any reason why the richest country in the world does things this way other than voter suppression. What am I missing?
The red states, Republicans use it as a tool to reduce participation of urban, non-white voters and reduce overall participation. They don't consider systematic, passive voter suppression techniques to be voter fraud.
Right, but even for Peruvians, you show up at the both, make your vote and leave, that's it. No thresholds for registering or other stuff, just you and your ID making a vote, even when outside the country. It again makes the US system seem intentionally designed to make less people vote.
If a bunch of politicians can make voting quasi-impossible for certain groups of people by meddling with their polling stations, then you don't have a functioning democracy.
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it's actually easy in Australia. That still doesn't really explain why it's necessary.
For people not on the roll, there is a special secondary method of voting called a declaration vote that allows you e.g. to vote even if you haven't enrolled. But this process wouldn't scale very well - these votes aren't counted for days after as they need to check the details you declared - and is intended as a safety net.
This seems a bit like Chesterton's fence...
However, now I live in New York, where they seem to go out of their way to make it difficult. The registration cutoff is several weeks before the election and for at least one election, I found myself wrongfully expunged from the voter roles.
I think it may just be how corrupt the state government is.
Re: the draft - if you are eligible for it you have to register to it, just like voter registration except it's mandatory. If you don't register for selective service you can't get federal college loans IIRC. You also have to register for the draft to apply for a green card?
(When you become of US citizen one of the first tasks is to take your naturalization document to your local SSA office so that they can update your file and issue you a new card without the notice)
The only citizens who aren't in the social security database are people who were never registered at birth, either because their parents didn't tick the box when registering or they were born overseas and their parents never registered the birth with the US government. Both can easily get registered via their birth certificate.
Everyone else in the system has already provided documentation to verify their status one way or the other.
The registration process is mostly a legacy system to ensure only qualified individuals vote, left over from a time when the bar was much higher.
And frankly, similat to "landowner". You arw simply biasing it toward slaveowners and their class.
The US was organized around a very limited federal government (this has changed over time). Each state is responsible for elections within the state. There's no exact national registry of citizens, although Social Security keeps a de facto registry as most citizens are enumerated by that administration and their records include citizenship indication. Strictly speaking, registration with social security is not mandatory, it is required for employees and a child must be registered to qualify for tax credits and it makes administrative tasks simpler.
Within each state, voting is typically administered by county (or similar level) offices; although I think many states have a state wide process to register.
A given voter will vote for many positions (and often some propositions), and electoral boundaries for positions don't necessarily align with anything else or each other. So there's a lot of complexity there.
The residence address of the voter is the important thing that decides which elections they can participate in, but since there is no real registry of residence (de facto or de jure), it needs to be collected seperately.
[1] https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/R1...
The drivers license database is the defaco registry of where you live and most states require you to update your address within 2 weeks of moving (although enforcement is loose). There is a state identification card for those who don't drive that fulfills the same purpose as a drivers license.
Since RealID states now have to check immigration status if you request a RealID license (some states will issue non-RealID drivers licenses to the undocumented). There is a further Enhanced ID check that some states do that will indicate that you are a US citizen on the license. RealID and non RealID licenses are clearly marked.
Basically true voter fraud is largely a non issue because the States generally have their systems together. Voter suppression, which is the goal of most of the voting related legislation of the last 20 years, is however rampant.
These tactics don't work as well if you are a homeowner that has stayed in the same (gerrymandered) area for an extended length of time.
Such people are, of course, not supposed to be allowed to vote in federal elections (18 U.S.C. § 611 , but also just common sense). Voter registration represents one way to detect if someone who has illegally entered the country (and it is common knowledge that one of the two major parties treats such individuals far more favourably than the other) is trying to vote.
It's also, as you were told, seen in France and possibly other European countries; and here in Canada as well — in all these cases, despite the lack of the above problem. It seems to me like an entirely normal thing and I can't really fathom why people would object to it so strenuously. Not everyone is allowed to vote (generally children are not; incarcerated criminals are not in many countries other than the US, including Mexico, Japan and the UK, as well as Australia and NZ on longer sentences; again there is the matter of illegal immigration; in fact, a quick check indicates that non-citizen legal immigrants are not allowed to vote federally hardly anywhere); given the importance of the vote, why would you not want these simple procedures to ensure that voting is done only by those allowed to?
Once I turned 18 I was automatically enrolled in the voting registries, as was everybody else once they got the requirements (18 years, citizenship, no pending penal law issues, etc). While there have been small scale issues, I've never heard of tens of thousands of people purged erroneously from the registries (while it is a regular occurrence in the USA), and no one I know has ever had to do something to be eligible to vote once they had the requirements. I'm sure it happens that people for whatever reason are not automatically registered, but it's not a common occurrence at all.
> given the importance of the vote, why would you not want these simple procedures to ensure that voting is done only by those allowed to
because these simple procedures are not necessary to achieve that objective
Voter registration is mandatory in France.
Conservatives attempted to copy the US voter ID requirements, but without realizing that the underlying demographic distribution of ID is different, and besides you can just postal vote anyway.
And it isn't even a secret. You can find quotes where politicians talk openly about it. I'm trying to be neutral here but when I say "politicians" I mean within one party.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/when...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/inside-house-republicans-pl...
https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/historyvotersuppression/web...
> I read your Fox News article. It does not even remotely establish anything like "talking openly" about "racism". In fact, it explicitly portrays the "politicians" in question advocating for "a proof of citizenship mandate for the voter registration process, and a nationwide photo ID rule to cast a ballot", and describing these as "really commonsense provisions", which they would be in countries that didn't form as an amalgamation of existing states (provinces, cantons, whatever you want to call them). All the arguments I've heard against this bill have been absurd, for example a canard about women supposedly not being able to prove their (entirely optional) name change when they get married.
This is a completely reasonable argument to make and it is completely unreasonable to try to suppress it, even if you disagree. If you believe there is something in the Fox News article that supports your claim, feel free to quote it. If "you can find" these quotes, show me some. Like, from within the last few years, not from the Goldwater era, please.
The problem is that they aren't interconnected in any meaningful way by design so the bulk of the work gets pushed onto states. Real ID forced a lot of the states to get their act together but it's still a bit of a goat rodeo in places.
There's also birth certificates, which are state-based databases, AFAIK, so there is that route too, and that process is more along the lines of how we're a federation.
(& for voter registration, probably the most common method, at least IME, is to bootstrap that from your state license/ID; since those are generally REAL IDs now, most individuals would provide birth cert and SSN, since that is the most broadly fulfillable requirement of REAL ID.)
Do you speak for all of Europe? Or do different countries in Europe have different approaches to voting? What you are missing is that this is similar to the US in that we have fifty different States each of which handle voting their own way. There is no singular answer at the federal level, though some people are trying to push in that direction.
Illegal immigrant voted: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/colombian-national-plea...
6,600 noncitizens registered, 400 noncitizens voted, undisclosed how many, if any, are unlawfully in country: https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2026/6600-nonci...
This is the strongest evidence the nation can turn up on voter fraud. It sure looks to me that the system is catching the absolutely minuscule amount of non-voters voting and that voter fraud is mostly a non-issue.
It appears the more common voter fraud is a US citizen voting in elections outside their home residence. Like Ken Paxton, running for senate in TX, who it appears voted numerous times using his ex-wife's address, including to vote for himself.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/07/ken-paxton-voting-el...
> What examples of American voter fraud (real or alleged) have been promoted in right-wing media within the last 28 days?
and find multiple results with considerable detail. If you want to hear anecdotes from ordinary people who've witnessed it (or at least had good reason for suspicion), it's not hard to find the right circles for that, either. But by its nature, few have access to the information that would be needed to evidence it properly.
More importantly, though, there are plenty of people who can point at how insecure the system is and how cheap and easy it would (or should) be to fix that. It's hard to understand how there can be such strenuous objection to fixing it if there is actually no problem. It's hard to understand how there can be so many people who are definitely following the law, but would face a hardship if expected to prove it even minimally.
Canadians must identify themselves in federal elections (https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...) and normally register in advance (https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=reg&do...) which is usually as simple as ticking a checkbox to give consent for the CRA (equivalent to IRS) to pass on your data to Elections Canada (which is independent of the government). None of this is even slightly controversial here; even our most left-wing parties (and the centre of gravity of our entire system is generally considered to be well to the left of the US's) are not trying to eliminate the requirement.
Stopping voter fraud really isn't that difficult. Just don't over-complicate it with silly things like electronic voting machines or mass mail-in voting and there's not a lot that can go wrong.
We should be very, very wary of non-auditable electronic voting though.
There is no such line. Of course the state and the people should be clear on who is and is not legally entitled to vote, in advance of actual voting. How could it be otherwise?
I feel like acting like things are impossible which are done in other regions without issue is a losing argument, no?
Voter registration deadlines are a tool for paternalistic racists and classists to enforce their voter suppression agenda with the thinnest veil of plausible deniability. Here you are, declaring their denial as strictly plausible.
Maybe we could have voter registration deadlines if there weren't so many bad actors who use it as a tool for voter suppression, but apparently ~50% of US state governments can't be trusted with that responsibility.
Edit: that's actually the issue, inherently; many rules and requirements for voting sound reasonable when presented absent of the context of the entire history of the United States (especially in the apartheid South...), but there are literal neo-Klansmen who will twist and bend those rules into onerous requirements that make sure that only white wealthy people who live in certain zip codes and have plenty of flexibility in their schedule have an opportunity to vote.
And you fall for that trap with some sort of rationalist aloofness that's so common on this Silicon Valley technology forum. This is why being "woke" matters and the Trumpist campaign against historical literacy is critical to keeping certain states red. The historical literacy in some of these states is already abysmal (based on first-hand conversations), and to think it could get even worse...
> there are literal neo-Klansmen who will twist and bend those rules into onerous requirements
The year is 2026, not 1956.
> And you fall for that trap with some sort of rationalist aloofness that's so common on this Silicon Valley technology forum.
It is not a "trap". It is what actually looking at actual evidence tells me.
By definition, "historical literacy" is something that tells you about what used to happen. This does not explain what currently happens.
What currently happens is explained by looking at contemporary evidence. I have, as a Canadian who constantly has to have these arguments because of the American cultural dominance of the Internet, looked into it quite a bit. It does not support your assertions.