When I first registered in Texas, they told me that something didn’t match the details with Social Security and that they couldn’t process my registration. Unfortunately, they never told me exactly what didn’t match. After chasing Social Security and the county multiple times, I eventually figured out that someone had put an extra space in my middle name. The staff processing my request were very helpful, but unfortunately, they didn’t even know what exactly was not matching.
It’s really unfortunate that you have the burden of proving that your information is correct. It took me about 6/7 weeks to complete the entire process.
They also mail you a voter registration card (which itself isn’t useful anywhere), and if, for any reason, it doesn’t reach you, your name will be suspended from the list.
The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
When corporations use similar tactics we call them “dark patterns”. Unfortunately, the only weapon we the people have against these tactics is regulation. But when it’s the government doing these things… anyway. Hope the Democratic Party has learned that conservative leadership won’t evolve their platform, they’ll reject democracy.
There’s a good number of sincere democrats who are being hamstrung by an aging and self-interested Democratic leadership.
The Democrat Party, as an organization, exists first and foremost to fundraise and the best way to do that is to seek corporate donors, thanks to Citizens United, since its easier to court one or two very large donations than hundreds or thousands of small individual donors.
What happens politically and the resultant laws are basically secondary. You, the taxpayer, doesn’t pay the DNC to do its job. Donors do.
I mean - as much as it's the "better" of the two options right now... the modern democratic party is still a center-right party controlled mostly by corporate interests and lobbying money.
They favor keeping the system that is producing rampant inequity stable. With a laissez faire approach to social issues.
As opposed to republicans, who favor socially regressive and oppressive policies, double speak, and who's mantra is mostly "Don't get caught. But if you do get caught - deny, deflect, denounce" rather than anything resembling ethical behavior.
Neither of them are particularly good options for governance. They have no motivations to "learn" anything.
One is a fast moving, malignant cancer - the other a slow moving auto-immune disease. Both kill the host.
> The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
Possible, but I doubt it. I've worked on the systems that do things like ID correlation/verification on the backend. They're ... imagine the most broken possible implementation you've ever worked on, then imagine it worse, then imagine that it's maintained by entirely different contractors than the ones that built it, with minimal incentive for improvement.
That's most of government IT implementations, and has been for decades.
Even when specific systems in this area are implemented well, the regulatory/bureaucratic complexity of the government prevents them from being more than marginally useful at best. I expanded more on some of the concerns/issues in this area in an adjacent comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832393
The system is designed to rely on fundamentally-flawed things like ID correlation and verification. Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.
> Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.
I have trouble believing that, given that the "design", such as it is, took place over many decades of inter-agency regulatory/technical wrangling and organic growth.
At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals. Sometimes those goals were "make sure everyone eligible can vote as easily as possible"--and that's laudable! But more often the goals were "build $niche_system_component to comply with $specific_regulation". The number of times, during the design phase, where the people planning actually wanted to suppress votes and were empowered to make a part of the system actually do that was probably a rounding error compared to times when people fully accidentally moved the system in that direction due to bureaucratic myopia and shitty implementation.
I'm all for blaming political actors for things they intentionally do that are bad! Defunding the EPA? Bad! Getting into stupid wars? Bad! Banning mail-in voting? Bad! People with power and pre-meditated goals did those things, and many more, and should be opposed for it.
But "voting system is broken due to bureaucratic inter-operation failures, and state government staff have to do a postmortem and data recovery (ballot reprocessing)" isn't one of those times.
Maybe that's the designed part? I mean, in lots of more "modern" countries (for the lack of better word), voting is basically showing up, presenting ID, then you can check for the results online yourself to see it registered properly, then that's it.
To me the whole system with voter registration and all other jazz, seems designed to indeed discourage people from voting. Why wouldn't you want it to be efficient and simple otherwise?
> The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
It is, with specific emphasis on discouraging people in cities from voting. The state has done all sorts of fuckery to limit the ability of people in urban centers from having any voice in government. Some of the most incredible gerrymanders in the country, limits on voting locations and times imposed specifically on large cities, many small frictions to make voting more time-consuming and expensive.
It's why they can get away with naked corruption and bumbling incompetence and still retain a firm hold on power. Well, that, and copious oil billionaire money flowing to Texas elections.
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?
It's a distinct blue/red state issue. Blue states go out of their way to register as many of their residents as possible and allow same day registration.
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.
Outside of the US spectrum, there are countries that require all citizens to vote or face fines (Peru for example). I find this interesting, because it's so out of sample compared to the typical political fights within the US about voter registration.
> Outside of the US spectrum, there are countries that require all citizens to vote or face fines (Peru for example).
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.
This is also seen in the actual voting process itself. Stories about Americans having to stand in the scorching sun for hours are just absolutely mind-boggling to me: you should expect everyone to vote, and provide enough capacity for everyone to cast a vote during their daily commute or grocery trip without a significant delay!
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.
Australia has a separate electoral roll that you have to apply to get on and compulsory voting (and enrollment). It's not a US thing, it's a common law anglosphere thing.
I'm not sure it's strictly red state/blue state. I've live in Massachusetts and Minnesota for a while, where they made it very easy to vote so that tracks.
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.
It's the price paid for not having a general population register. You only need to enroll to vote if you want to vote, and the voter registration is (theoretically) only for that purpose and won't be used for other purposes. Every government interaction in the anglosphere works this way; you always have to reprove your id and address from scratch.
More specifically, it pretends it doesn't have a general population register. In reality there is a nearly 1:1 match between citizens and SSNs, but everyone just pretends it doesn't exist for political reasons. The fact that the USA was ever able to do a draft is another obvious counterexample.
It's not really a 1:1 match. Any foreigner who has ever worked in the US has one too (me included). Plus voter registration also covers subnational elections, which SSN data would not help with.
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?
The European population registers are as bad as voter registration btw and as manipulated. I'm currently not registered (which is illegal) as I've been purged from the population register and due to similar bureaucratic excuses, can't re-register. Fortunately it's usually irrelevant, but I have no doubt some government department is bending statistics in its favor by excluding a group of people that includes me.
American Democracy started from a place of very strict voter requirements (white, male, adult, landowner) and is trending towards fewer voter requirements.
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.
Pretty sure countries in Europe have voter registration too? Here's a page to register in France. [1]
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.
Since the motor voter bills in the 90s. Most US states handle voter registration via the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). When you apply for your license or renew you tick the box and it automatically registers you.
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.
The model was conceived when there were wide plain, few people and traveling messaging results took days to weeks. And it was never adapted. I'd say most of European voting was with shorter distances, higher population density and newer technology.
It's not mandatory in the UK, but it's pretty frictionless. The only downside is that the data is sold commercially.
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.
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.
Correct. In my country anyone is able to audit the process, and the only case of fraud was an instance of "granny farming" for local municipality elections - which after a full redo resulted in... exactly the same outcome.
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.
Yes. Just like there is basically zero fraud in America. This isn't a problem. It is only for the dumbest people who believe Trump that 'millions of illegal immigrants voted' yet they haven't produced a single bit of evidence to prove it, but I'm sure it's real.
To be fair, as was seen with Bush v. Gore a very small number of votes can change the entire political landscape. Something probably ought to be done about that as well.
There’s a rich history of voter suppression tactics in the US. Naïve conservatives refuse to see the straight line from poll taxes to voter registration deadlines. Anti-democratic conservatives take great joy in continuing the racist and classist traditions of their forefathers (both by blood and by tradition), and you’ll find such characters packed in the state governments in the South.
Do you live in one of the European countries that has a registry of all citizens? At some point, the government needs to have some notion of who you are. The US has no central registry, so it gets pushed out to the periphery like this.
The Federal government has several central registries. The social security database for example knows which socials belong to citizens and which do not. The IRS database another as are the passport and visa databases.
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.
Just to add to this, not only does the federal government have, for example, SSNs, but, e.g., in my state, supplying a SSN (which then gets verified with the federal government by the state government) is one of the ways in which you can prove citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote.
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.)
I'd say it's more than a technical problem. The States have primary responsibility for regulating voting, and do not seem at all interested in handing that over to the federal government. Even if it is just to get access to databases (which I assume they already have anyway if they want it).
None of those registries is comprehensive, even if they're literally all joined together, and the only one coming close to it SSA. IRS and passports is are particularly nasty ones to rely on because you'd systematically disenfranchise specific demographics like young adults, poor people, etc.
Yes, and Social Security number is used as universal identifier today because it's the only thing available, it was never intended as such. There's a long history of resistance to central data collection in the US.
You aren't missing anything, it's almost all about voter suppression, and a lot of that is about racism.
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.
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.
If someone can't bother registering to vote, they shouldn't vote. Only active citizens, who are wiling to put some effort in should vote, voting is not an activity that aught to be taken lightly.
See, and here I thought that a democracy meant that everyone would get a vote!
So who gets to determine what counts as "some effort"? Is putting voter registration behind a Rube Goldberg machine enough, or should we go for an IQ test? How about sitting in a room for 72 consecutive hours before being able to cast your vote? Should we perhaps "grandfather in" people who have already proven to be trustworthy as well?
Voting is a fundamental human right. If politicians can make rules deciding who gets to vote, then those politicians will disenfranchise people voting for their opponents. The only solution is to make sure everyone can vote - including the "undesirables" like dumb people and prisoners.
Obvious example: you spelled "ought" wrong, this means that according to my arbitrary rules passed by a democratically-elected government you are not smart enough to vote. And no, you can't change the rules: you'd first have to elect a different government, which you can't do because you can't vote.
I posted an older article because I wanted the focus to be on the online registration system. According to a newer article, the number is easily in the tens of thousands [1].
Oregon auto atically registers you to vote when you get a license/ID, and has a pretty reliable mail in voting system. Other states interested in their constituents should do the same
They are really persistent, but it might still not be enough to prevent the democratic candidate from becoming senator, since the republican one is so odious that plenty of reliable republican voters are signalling their intent to vote for the democrat as a come-to-jesus message to their own party.
So - we found a bug, are fixing it, and it will cause an extra load on the people sorting through the backlog. Seems like a system working as it should. Bugs happen, and it is this kind of situation which makes me glad individual states manage their own voting systems - a problem in one doesn’t impact everyone.
As a TX resident possibly affected by this, I for one am grateful for my neighbors at the local election office working hard to get this resolved.
It punishes large counties, who'll have to pay overtime or hire new employees to help with the sudden backlog, or risk leaving people in the county disenfranchised. Punishing cities is part of the Republican agenda. Whether this one is incompetence (seems likely) or intentional manipulation remains to be seen. But, it is certainly convenient for Republicans that it is most costly, and most likely disruptive, for the cities that don't vote for Republicans. Somehow, Travis and Harris counties, in particular, are always having to jump through extra hoops to make sure their voters are able to vote. And, sometimes, the things they'd like to do to make it easier to vote are outlawed by the state (e.g. Harris county, specifically, has limits on the number of ballot drop-off locations they can have, imposed by the state).
And, what would have happened had journalist not discovered it a couple of months before the election? Would those registrations have just been lost until after?
> Whether this one is incompetence (seems likely) or intentional manipulation
And that's the issue right? All your points on what could have happened are good points - but this really does seem like the kind of bug that shows up even in systems implemented by competent people. As the most likely interpretation, I'll give my neighbors the benefit of the doubt. If we can't trust our neighbors to (mostly) do the right thing, but suspect foul play for every hiccup, then our republic really does have a problem.
If we had evidence that it _was_ intentional sabotage, well then - this situation would look rather different. Probably worse than picante sauce from New York City [1].
When I first registered in Texas, they told me that something didn’t match the details with Social Security and that they couldn’t process my registration. Unfortunately, they never told me exactly what didn’t match. After chasing Social Security and the county multiple times, I eventually figured out that someone had put an extra space in my middle name. The staff processing my request were very helpful, but unfortunately, they didn’t even know what exactly was not matching.
It’s really unfortunate that you have the burden of proving that your information is correct. It took me about 6/7 weeks to complete the entire process.
They also mail you a voter registration card (which itself isn’t useful anywhere), and if, for any reason, it doesn’t reach you, your name will be suspended from the list.
The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
When corporations use similar tactics we call them “dark patterns”. Unfortunately, the only weapon we the people have against these tactics is regulation. But when it’s the government doing these things… anyway. Hope the Democratic Party has learned that conservative leadership won’t evolve their platform, they’ll reject democracy.
I'm not convinced the Democratic Party is capable of learning anything ever at all.
Or maybe I'm confusing incompetence with malice. Maybe they want to lose and be the spoiler party.
There’s a good number of sincere democrats who are being hamstrung by an aging and self-interested Democratic leadership.
The Democrat Party, as an organization, exists first and foremost to fundraise and the best way to do that is to seek corporate donors, thanks to Citizens United, since its easier to court one or two very large donations than hundreds or thousands of small individual donors.
What happens politically and the resultant laws are basically secondary. You, the taxpayer, doesn’t pay the DNC to do its job. Donors do.
I mean - as much as it's the "better" of the two options right now... the modern democratic party is still a center-right party controlled mostly by corporate interests and lobbying money.
They favor keeping the system that is producing rampant inequity stable. With a laissez faire approach to social issues.
As opposed to republicans, who favor socially regressive and oppressive policies, double speak, and who's mantra is mostly "Don't get caught. But if you do get caught - deny, deflect, denounce" rather than anything resembling ethical behavior.
Neither of them are particularly good options for governance. They have no motivations to "learn" anything.
One is a fast moving, malignant cancer - the other a slow moving auto-immune disease. Both kill the host.
We desperately need fresh air.
a gun?
The government has bigger guns.
Against whom?
Only way to correctly vote on your ballot. Blow away hanging chads
Maybe that's because it is, maybe most people the current Texas leadership want to get votes from are not the ones that newly first register in Texas?
> The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
Possible, but I doubt it. I've worked on the systems that do things like ID correlation/verification on the backend. They're ... imagine the most broken possible implementation you've ever worked on, then imagine it worse, then imagine that it's maintained by entirely different contractors than the ones that built it, with minimal incentive for improvement.
That's most of government IT implementations, and has been for decades.
Even when specific systems in this area are implemented well, the regulatory/bureaucratic complexity of the government prevents them from being more than marginally useful at best. I expanded more on some of the concerns/issues in this area in an adjacent comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832393
The system is designed to rely on fundamentally-flawed things like ID correlation and verification. Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.
> Broken implementations were the desired outcome, because the constant doubt allows for things like disenfranchising people via voter roll purging.
I have trouble believing that, given that the "design", such as it is, took place over many decades of inter-agency regulatory/technical wrangling and organic growth.
At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals. Sometimes those goals were "make sure everyone eligible can vote as easily as possible"--and that's laudable! But more often the goals were "build $niche_system_component to comply with $specific_regulation". The number of times, during the design phase, where the people planning actually wanted to suppress votes and were empowered to make a part of the system actually do that was probably a rounding error compared to times when people fully accidentally moved the system in that direction due to bureaucratic myopia and shitty implementation.
I'm all for blaming political actors for things they intentionally do that are bad! Defunding the EPA? Bad! Getting into stupid wars? Bad! Banning mail-in voting? Bad! People with power and pre-meditated goals did those things, and many more, and should be opposed for it.
But "voting system is broken due to bureaucratic inter-operation failures, and state government staff have to do a postmortem and data recovery (ballot reprocessing)" isn't one of those times.
> At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals.
Until 2013, some states were under Federal preclearance rules because those "totally different goals" were historically "don't let black people vote".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_v._Holder
Maybe that's the designed part? I mean, in lots of more "modern" countries (for the lack of better word), voting is basically showing up, presenting ID, then you can check for the results online yourself to see it registered properly, then that's it.
To me the whole system with voter registration and all other jazz, seems designed to indeed discourage people from voting. Why wouldn't you want it to be efficient and simple otherwise?
> The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
It is, with specific emphasis on discouraging people in cities from voting. The state has done all sorts of fuckery to limit the ability of people in urban centers from having any voice in government. Some of the most incredible gerrymanders in the country, limits on voting locations and times imposed specifically on large cities, many small frictions to make voting more time-consuming and expensive.
It's why they can get away with naked corruption and bumbling incompetence and still retain a firm hold on power. Well, that, and copious oil billionaire money flowing to Texas elections.
>The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
Now you get it.
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?
It's a distinct blue/red state issue. Blue states go out of their way to register as many of their residents as possible and allow same day registration.
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.
Outside of the US spectrum, there are countries that require all citizens to vote or face fines (Peru for example). I find this interesting, because it's so out of sample compared to the typical political fights within the US about voter registration.
> Outside of the US spectrum, there are countries that require all citizens to vote or face fines (Peru for example).
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.
This is also seen in the actual voting process itself. Stories about Americans having to stand in the scorching sun for hours are just absolutely mind-boggling to me: you should expect everyone to vote, and provide enough capacity for everyone to cast a vote during their daily commute or grocery trip without a significant delay!
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.
Australia has a separate electoral roll that you have to apply to get on and compulsory voting (and enrollment). It's not a US thing, it's a common law anglosphere thing.
I'm not sure it's strictly red state/blue state. I've live in Massachusetts and Minnesota for a while, where they made it very easy to vote so that tracks.
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.
It's the price paid for not having a general population register. You only need to enroll to vote if you want to vote, and the voter registration is (theoretically) only for that purpose and won't be used for other purposes. Every government interaction in the anglosphere works this way; you always have to reprove your id and address from scratch.
More specifically, it pretends it doesn't have a general population register. In reality there is a nearly 1:1 match between citizens and SSNs, but everyone just pretends it doesn't exist for political reasons. The fact that the USA was ever able to do a draft is another obvious counterexample.
It's not really a 1:1 match. Any foreigner who has ever worked in the US has one too (me included). Plus voter registration also covers subnational elections, which SSN data would not help with.
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?
The European population registers are as bad as voter registration btw and as manipulated. I'm currently not registered (which is illegal) as I've been purged from the population register and due to similar bureaucratic excuses, can't re-register. Fortunately it's usually irrelevant, but I have no doubt some government department is bending statistics in its favor by excluding a group of people that includes me.
You're not missing anything.
American Democracy started from a place of very strict voter requirements (white, male, adult, landowner) and is trending towards fewer voter requirements.
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.
Pretty sure countries in Europe have voter registration too? Here's a page to register in France. [1]
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...
Since the motor voter bills in the 90s. Most US states handle voter registration via the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). When you apply for your license or renew you tick the box and it automatically registers you.
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.
The model was conceived when there were wide plain, few people and traveling messaging results took days to weeks. And it was never adapted. I'd say most of European voting was with shorter distances, higher population density and newer technology.
> so alien to my European brain
Voter registration is mandatory in France.
It's not mandatory in the UK, but it's pretty frictionless. The only downside is that the data is sold commercially.
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.
> my European brain
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.
You think there’s no voter fraud in Europe?
Correct. In my country anyone is able to audit the process, and the only case of fraud was an instance of "granny farming" for local municipality elections - which after a full redo resulted in... exactly the same outcome.
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.
Yes. Just like there is basically zero fraud in America. This isn't a problem. It is only for the dumbest people who believe Trump that 'millions of illegal immigrants voted' yet they haven't produced a single bit of evidence to prove it, but I'm sure it's real.
For context:
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...
To be fair, as was seen with Bush v. Gore a very small number of votes can change the entire political landscape. Something probably ought to be done about that as well.
There’s a rich history of voter suppression tactics in the US. Naïve conservatives refuse to see the straight line from poll taxes to voter registration deadlines. Anti-democratic conservatives take great joy in continuing the racist and classist traditions of their forefathers (both by blood and by tradition), and you’ll find such characters packed in the state governments in the South.
Do you live in one of the European countries that has a registry of all citizens? At some point, the government needs to have some notion of who you are. The US has no central registry, so it gets pushed out to the periphery like this.
The Federal government has several central registries. The social security database for example knows which socials belong to citizens and which do not. The IRS database another as are the passport and visa databases.
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.
Just to add to this, not only does the federal government have, for example, SSNs, but, e.g., in my state, supplying a SSN (which then gets verified with the federal government by the state government) is one of the ways in which you can prove citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote.
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.)
I'd say it's more than a technical problem. The States have primary responsibility for regulating voting, and do not seem at all interested in handing that over to the federal government. Even if it is just to get access to databases (which I assume they already have anyway if they want it).
None of those registries is comprehensive, even if they're literally all joined together, and the only one coming close to it SSA. IRS and passports is are particularly nasty ones to rely on because you'd systematically disenfranchise specific demographics like young adults, poor people, etc.
Yes, and Social Security number is used as universal identifier today because it's the only thing available, it was never intended as such. There's a long history of resistance to central data collection in the US.
You aren't missing anything, it's almost all about voter suppression, and a lot of that is about racism.
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.
If someone can't bother registering to vote, they shouldn't vote. Only active citizens, who are wiling to put some effort in should vote, voting is not an activity that aught to be taken lightly.
See, and here I thought that a democracy meant that everyone would get a vote!
So who gets to determine what counts as "some effort"? Is putting voter registration behind a Rube Goldberg machine enough, or should we go for an IQ test? How about sitting in a room for 72 consecutive hours before being able to cast your vote? Should we perhaps "grandfather in" people who have already proven to be trustworthy as well?
Voting is a fundamental human right. If politicians can make rules deciding who gets to vote, then those politicians will disenfranchise people voting for their opponents. The only solution is to make sure everyone can vote - including the "undesirables" like dumb people and prisoners.
Obvious example: you spelled "ought" wrong, this means that according to my arbitrary rules passed by a democratically-elected government you are not smart enough to vote. And no, you can't change the rules: you'd first have to elect a different government, which you can't do because you can't vote.
I posted an older article because I wanted the focus to be on the online registration system. According to a newer article, the number is easily in the tens of thousands [1].
[1] https://www.votebeat.org/texas/2026/09/23/dps-error-backlogg...
TIL a great deal of voter registration in Texas still happens using paper forms: https://www.votebeat.org/texas/2024/10/28/voter-registration...
And apparently they sometimes get lost or processed incorrectly, leaving people disenfranchised.
Oregon auto atically registers you to vote when you get a license/ID, and has a pretty reliable mail in voting system. Other states interested in their constituents should do the same
They are really persistent, but it might still not be enough to prevent the democratic candidate from becoming senator, since the republican one is so odious that plenty of reliable republican voters are signalling their intent to vote for the democrat as a come-to-jesus message to their own party.
So - we found a bug, are fixing it, and it will cause an extra load on the people sorting through the backlog. Seems like a system working as it should. Bugs happen, and it is this kind of situation which makes me glad individual states manage their own voting systems - a problem in one doesn’t impact everyone.
As a TX resident possibly affected by this, I for one am grateful for my neighbors at the local election office working hard to get this resolved.
It punishes large counties, who'll have to pay overtime or hire new employees to help with the sudden backlog, or risk leaving people in the county disenfranchised. Punishing cities is part of the Republican agenda. Whether this one is incompetence (seems likely) or intentional manipulation remains to be seen. But, it is certainly convenient for Republicans that it is most costly, and most likely disruptive, for the cities that don't vote for Republicans. Somehow, Travis and Harris counties, in particular, are always having to jump through extra hoops to make sure their voters are able to vote. And, sometimes, the things they'd like to do to make it easier to vote are outlawed by the state (e.g. Harris county, specifically, has limits on the number of ballot drop-off locations they can have, imposed by the state).
And, what would have happened had journalist not discovered it a couple of months before the election? Would those registrations have just been lost until after?
> Whether this one is incompetence (seems likely) or intentional manipulation
And that's the issue right? All your points on what could have happened are good points - but this really does seem like the kind of bug that shows up even in systems implemented by competent people. As the most likely interpretation, I'll give my neighbors the benefit of the doubt. If we can't trust our neighbors to (mostly) do the right thing, but suspect foul play for every hiccup, then our republic really does have a problem.
If we had evidence that it _was_ intentional sabotage, well then - this situation would look rather different. Probably worse than picante sauce from New York City [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S828Y7Eais
Everything's bigger in Texas, including the corruption and incompetence of state government.
It'll be the least shocking thing ever to find out this "error" disproportionately affected Democratic leaning districts.