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"You won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians."
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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States can do it. Elections belong to the States, not federal government. So talk to your state government and tell then what you want.
Yeah, there's also a bit of a difference in that voting is connected to where you live, while selective service registration doesnt really matter where you live, just that you exist (and are male). They can find you if they need to.
Also, I've lived in multiple states with "automatic voter registration", and it's really a misnomer. All it is is an extra check box when you get a driver's license, so registration is: 1) not happening if you dont have a driver's license, 2) not happening if you choose not to check the box.
I've made this rant before, but every country has voter registration somehow. Even Australia where you are required to vote, it's still on the individual to enroll and update their enrollment whenever they move. Similarly, I've had Dutch people tell me they dont have to register to vote, and this is also not true because they have to register to exist at whatever address they live at, and voting registration is conferred along with that.
Some places let you prove you can vote when you go to the polling location, but that's still effectively the same thing.
The only way for it to be truly automatic is if you live in a microstate that doesnt have multiple voting districts, or the government surveils you to keep track of where you live.
So just like paying taxes
Automatic voter registration that would cover 99% of eligible voters would be easy if we made that checkbox an opt out and put it on more government paperwork (e.g. tax filings, Medicaid applications, public school student registration stuff, etc.), we just lack the political will to do it
This is the real best answer, I think. If they can put a check box in the driver's license application, they can spam it in a whole bunch of other spots.
Not everyone does taxes, either, but there are certainly way more automatic spots you could try to catch people. Between that and automatic mailed ballots, we could really increase voting.
I do also wish all states had open primaries. It seems really dumb that I have to link myself to a party that I dont like to try to select the least bad candidate.
Voter registration is still complety pointless. Why do you even need to register to vote? Sure, it's location-based, but you should just be able to show up to the polls with your drivers license which lists your address.
Why does it need to be a completely separate thing? This is just a method to suppress the vote.
Not everybody drives.
Or you ID.
Not everyone has ID either. There's no mandatory national identification card. Social Security number might be the closest thing, but has no relationship with where you live
There is probably a valid argument about the managing the logistics of poling places to be made here.
Jurisdictions need to know how many ballots, poll workers, and polling locations they need to actually run the election.
Registration also helps to determine what proportion of the electorate turned out. This can give hints to how well information about the time and place of elections was advertised and whether polling places were open long enough or at enough locations to give people the opertunity to vote.
The way in which registration is handled in a given jurisdiction can absolutely be designed to suppress votes.
Washington votes entirely by mail with the postal system handling out going and drop boxes and postal system handling incoming. The county generally knows how many adults live there and can just figure most adults are eligible voters.
You can register separately or when you get your id. If you are indigent the same place that gives you food stamps and medical insurance whether you have an address or not gives you a coupon for a $5 state ID.
No idea why it's $5 rather than zero under the circumstances and others may have challenges as far as coming in from out of state or needing multiple documents to establish identity especially married and divorced women who changed their name but generally people are pretty well served
That's great, and perhaps more of the country should.
Everywhere I have cast a ballot operates in person voting in addition to options for mail in ballots.
Washington state chose to address the logistics issues by removing polling stations. I would be curious how many people have problems when they move counties.
Why do you need a separate registration step to do any of that? You already know how many eligible voters live in each precinct. Voter registration made sense before state-issued photo ids were a thing. But they're now just a tool of voter suppression.
What can you do with voter registration rolls that you can't do with a database of names, addresses, and citizenship status?
In the US, at least, there are no standard, state-issued IDs. Driver's licenses largely fill that role, but as others have noted, not everyone drives (and not everyone who drives has an up-to-date license).
Is there? Never had to register to vote, never had to walk more than a few minutes to the polling place, never had to wait more than a few minutes to cast the vote. These are not unique experiences, but simply what everyone expects in any functional democracy.
When you cast a vote, how do they know you are eligible to vote there? The answer is that you registered at some point, though they may not have called it that
Yes of course, just not in a separate step. Every legal resident is automatically registered to vote.
So if I moved to your town, how would the people at the polls know I was a legal resident?
If you want to migrate here legally, you will have to apply for permanent or temporary residency. You will be registered to vote (insofar as you would be eligible to cast them) as soon as you do.
So the difference in the US is if you move to a different voting area, there's nothing requiring you to report your location to the government, so they would have no way of knowing that you live there.
Nothing? So you don't have to, say, pay taxes?
Depends on to which level of government you are talking about.
If I have a job I'm paying federal income tax. Most states also have an income tax, but not all.
If I own property, I'm probably paying some sort of real estate tax to the state xand/or county. If I'm renting, probably not.
If, for example, I'm out of work and move back home with my parents, there may not be a clear government record of where I live. Because of how large the US is, that could be a move of 1000+ miles from my last legal residence (would be for me anyway)
Right, so the government needs to know the address of most people for taxation purposes.
So then why not register them to vote while they're at it?
(It's because they want to suppress the vote.)
Not a terrible idea.
It may work in a lot places, but may be more challenging in states that don't have a state income tax. At least in the US, voter registration is handled by the State government, not the Federal government.
We would also need to account for eligible voters who are not paying taxes, (like college students, who may be living out of state to go to school, but I think would normally be expected to vote at "home")
Well, considering it's quite a simple concept and has worked without problems in many places for many decades, I think we can exclude the possibility that it may be "challenging" (except insofar as it may be challenging to convince voters and politicians to do it).
I don't doubt that it works well in many places.
It would probably work well in many places in the US.
I was just thinking about places like Washing state that don't have a state income tax, so combining taxation and voter registration would not be as straight forward as other places.
For better or worse the US constitution gives authority over most elections issues to the states, which means that we don't have one national voting system. And because most states give big portions of how elections are run to their various countries, the voting experience can be very different in different parts of the the nation.
I assume that we can learn a lot from other places, but I'm not sure that everything that works for one country always scales to a population 5-10x larger.
I see this kind of thinking a lot. I call it "inverse American exceptionalism" - the idea that something tried-and-tested just couldn't work in America for some unknown mystical reason.
Mandatory resident registration (which enables automatic voter registration) is not something that has just been tested in a few small European countries. Aside from many European countries, it exists among other places in China, Iran and Japan. Not that it would be sufficient if it were true that it exists only in small European countries to conclude that it couldn't work in the US.
No, the reason you don't have automatic voter registration, or universal access to health care and education, or a minimum income guarantee, or any of the other basic staples of prosperous societies, has nothing to do with the US being large, or having a constitution, or having a federal structure. You don't have those things because your politicians, largely with support from your voters, deliberately choose not to implement those things.
That's not a separate thing in a lot of states like I noted. Part of getting a driver's license is just proving to the government where you live, and thats what registering to vote is.
Requiring a license to operate a motor vehicle is what's suppressing the vote, not the idea that at some point before you cast a vote, you have to tell the government where you live.
Oh no!, the horror!, i have to change my address in different services if i move!
I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing, just that it's literally the same thing as registering to vote.
States can do it but Trump is pushing his agenda down State's throats and some of them are gargling his balls happily, which makes it harder for other states not to comply.
More states need to sign the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
CGP Grey video on the topic