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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- news
The Republican National Committee is urging the Supreme Court to intervene in an Arizona election dispute this week and block up to 40,000 of the state’s registered voters from casting ballots in the presidential race.
Republican state lawmakers say these voters did not provide proof of their citizenship when they were registered and now they should be barred from voting in person or by mail.
This whole concept of needing to separately register to vote ahead of time is insane to me.
As a Canadian, when I file my taxes there’s a tickbox that allows anyone to register (if it’s their first time) or update their address if they’ve done it before. Then you’ll get automatically mailed a voter card prior to any election giving you details on your riding and voting location.
However, even if you don’t do that, you can still vote on the day of the election by showing up with two pieces of ID. The process takes like 2 minutes longer because they need to fill out a short form, but they fill it out for you so you really don’t need to do anything but sign it.
To be clear, for those of us in the USA who don’t live in backwards-ass states, it’s basically the same as you describe. When I got my drivers license, I ticked a box that said I wanted to register to vote. I’ve never had a problem since then.
In some states, it’s even better than that - there is no checkbox at the DMV, they just automatically register you to vote if you’re eligible and it’s a whole process to not register. My anarchist never-voting roommate was so salty when the DMV automatically registered her to vote.
Also we have day-of voter registration that you don’t even need a current ID to do, the list of accepted documents is pretty good, and if you don’t have one of those documents sometime who is already registered can vouch for you (of course, you can get into trouble if you vouch for someone who is not supposed to be voting).
Minnesota is very proud of our best in the nation voter turnout.
The base concept of saying where you live in a highly mobile society makes sense for knowing how many ballots and staff to prepare, especially when there are so many local elected positions. It even helped with speeding up voting when all you needed to do was sign off when voting instead of all this ID bullshit.
Republicans weaponized a functioning system.
You don’t have a central electronic registry of where everyone lives?
Edit: on state level I mean
Nope. Voter registration is the closest we get to an up to date system that varifies residency and only for the purposes of voting.