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Citizen baby is born? Add them to the list of citizens. Citizen dies? Remove them from the list of citizens. Citizen moves? Have them inform their new municipality about their change of address - which they'll probably need to do anyways for tax and mail reasons.
No. There's a lot more nuance there than you'd think, in the "broken regulatory and technical processes" domain, not political issues.
Example questions with unsatisfactory (not "impossible to do well", just "broken due to decades of technical and regulatory debt") answers: what government agencies, plural, are the authority of who is a citizen? Do they all agree? Do they provide ways for different agencies to check identities against their registries? If so, how do they match information in a citizenship-check request against their internal systems? By name? If so, how do they handle different name spellings (marriages, name changes, present/omitted middle names, non-ASCII)? By some other identifier? If so, how do they validate uniqueness of that identifier (SSNs are not secure/are widely leaked for tens of millions of people, addresses change and can have multiple residents, not everyone has a passport number, state-issued IDs/drivers licenses aren't stored centrally by the federal government)? If a check-requested identifier is invalid, can they tell whoever requested the check why it's invalid? Do these validation requests happen in real time/one at a time, or periodically in batches? Do the people sending the validation requests have any contact at all with the people providing information about why unsuccessful requests failed?
I've worked on these systems--human and technical. It's hard even for a functioning, outcome-focused, centralized government. In this problem domain, the US federal government is none of those things, and has not been for many decades (or ever, in some areas).
Sure, some of the issues are politically-caused (one party has an incentive to not fix problems that privilege their agenda), but most of them are accumulated failures with no malicious agenda as the cause.
And plenty of that headwind is not coming from the "party of small government"! The refrain of "the government should not have centralized data it can use to infringe on my rights" often transcends party, depending on what issue is at hand. That's sometimes a reasonable position to hold, but it definitely has a cost, especially when taken to extremes, or when make-citizen-services-work-better initiatives are framed as spying or whatnot.
That is exactly what voter registration is?
Letting the government know that you moved is primarily about them knowing where to send letters, and which types of municipality taxes to charge you. As a side-effect they'll also inform a few other parties like banks and insurance companies, and the voter roll update is just another one of those things which happens automatically. Nobody thinks about it like a "voter registration", the whole concept doesn't even exist.
But seriously, your assumptions about how the USA works are just wrong. Voting is not handled at the federal level. Citizenship is.
the other party says its not rampant per say and resists all capability to prove it, because they think the solutions to proving legal voter status would be difficult for their citizen voters to accomplish
amusingly, the limited audits done always find improper votes for the first party, although nothing rampant
ironically, Commonwealth and European countries all have the voter status proving requirement that the first party is asking for, despite this being seen as an extremist right wing idea to be distanced from
in the US, it is accurate that any voter registration tweak has been used to decline legal voters ability to vote so the left - despite being more congruent ideals with the rest of the developed world - does have unique considerations and skepticism
did I miss anything?
Like Germany being touchy tracking religious affiliations post WWII, post civil-war America is touchy about voter supression - im specifically referencing post civil war voter suppression conducted in what was then a Democrat stronghold in the American South.
Many argue that shame has never gone away and is still being conducted today through modern tactics.
Many would argue such a shame should never be dismissed at all.
> it is accurate that any voter registration tweak has been used to decline legal voters ability to vote
so consensus is, no. you just didn’t like the way I wrote it
No, studies have been done, and routinely show that non-citizen voting in election accounts for a pittance of the vote (e.g., "A study of 2016 data by Brennan Center for Justice from 42 jurisdictions found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast (or .0001% of votes)"); historical data of prosecution of non-citizen voters agrees with the studies, similarly showing it to be non-issue.
There is evidence, the "one party" routinely presents it. This isn't some "both sides" issue.
> the other party […thinks] the solutions to proving legal voter status would be difficult for their citizen voters to accomplish
Yes, because they would. The GOP's proposed "SAVE Act", which was pushed directly by Trump, for example, would have (effectively) required most citizens to present passports as proof of citizenship. (And further, to obtain a passport, since most Americans do not have one.) (Among other problems with the bill.)
(And just to note, since there is some non-US in the thread: you have to be a citizen to register to vote, and — though this is handled on a state by state basis, but I do not think any state deviates here — you must prove that already at registration. The ongoing debate above simply makes that harder to do.)
Forget about the Brennan Center's single year audit. The Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Database[0] goes back 40+ years to 1982.
In those 40+ years, they have documented less than 2,000 cases of voter fraud, with more than 1,500,000,000 votes being cast within that time frame.
That's a voter fraud rate of 0.0001333%. And even if we (without evidence), claim that the amount of fraud is 10x (0.001333%) or even 100x (0.01333%)higher and just not detected, despite the presence of observers from all involved parties at all the polls/counting stations in all of the 3500+ separate elections[1] that take place in the US yearly.
The rate of fraudulent votes isn't high enough to impact the outcome of elections, even if we say that there's 100x more voter fraud than the folks who scream voter fraud is everywhere!!! have detected.
It's a complete non-issue that's used by cynical folks to make it harder for their political opponents to vote. Which is disgusting, IMNSHO.
[0] https://electionfraud.heritage.org/search?case_type=All
[1] Elections are managed at the county level (of which there are 3500+ in the US), although processes and procedures are often dictated by state governments.
No, they're satisfied with the existing proof. Which is pretty concrete.
For reference, the Finnish voting experience is such that about a month before the election you get a card to your registered address, telling what the election is and what's your polling place. Then you show up on the day in question, show an ID, they check that against their list and off you go.
If you had said 'immigrants' instead of non-citizens you would have a stronger point. I don't have an issue with non-citizen immigrants voting. Part of the challenge is a.) proving someone exists and b.) proving they live in the district in which they voted. How do you solve this? Voter registration.
Ignoring all that, voting is both a right and privilege of citizenship. This can be revoked. As an example, convicted felons cannot vote.
The 15th Amendment says (note the word citizens):
> The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The 19th Amendment then gave women the right to vote:
> The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
So, it is very much a law to be a citizen in order to vote.
As an aside, what if a non-citizen of an EU country was vacationing for a month in said EU country. Should they be able to vote? Of course not.
I didn't say no registration. Every US state has a residency requirement before you can register to vote. Get out of here with your disingenious hyperbolics.
>So, it is very much a law to be a citizen in order to vote.
Oh no I'm proposing changing the law, your quotes say nothing about limiting a non-citizen's ability to vote. I never argued about a right to vote for non-citizens. I took a very limited stance.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/611
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_Immigration_Reform_and...
Maybe we can ask SCOTUS to overthrow it on the "history and tradition" test Dobbs & Bruen recently (ironically) created.
States have banned noncitizen voting for statewide elections for a century.
"While federal law does not prohibit noncitizens from voting in state or local elections, no state has allowed noncitizens to vote in statewide elections since Arkansas became the last state to outlaw noncitizen voting in state elections in 1926."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizen_suffrage_in_the_Un...
Nothing says the 1996 law can't be undone (as it's not an amendment), and states can permit noncitizen voting outside of the Federal context if they feel like it. That's Federalism for you.
Its not like immigrant X from country Y can vote willy nilly.
This is not rocked science. Every citizen is automatically allowed to vote, and IF you cant vote where you are supposed to you can handle this case specially.