809
"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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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.