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
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.
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.
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 intentionally designed to make less people vote.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It makes sense if you remember that for them, all immigrants are illegal and some native-born people are immigrants. When they say "millions of illegal immigrants voted" they mean "one million legal immigrants, one million black citizens, and half a million Hispanic citizens voted"
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.
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.
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).
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.
one party says its rampant and cant prove it, they think the other party relies on non-citizens voting
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
I think you’re underscoring how much historical and cultural imperatives influence the electoral zeitgeist.
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 go away at all.
The Commonwealth and European countries make it easy to prove voting eligibility though. That's why it's not a crazy idea there. In the US every single time it's tried there end up being crazy manipulative requirements. E.g. gun permit (no photo) being a valid voter ID but student ID (with photo) not, because they want gun owners to vote more (as they vote republican) and students less (as they vote democrat), and of course there's no universal ID card like in European countries.
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.)
Surely the government already knows who is a citizen (otherwise it would not be able to stop noncitizens from registering), so surely it would be trivial for the government to use this list of citizens to send out ballots?
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.
> Surely the government already knows who is a citizen
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/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.
I know this was mostly glib, but it really doesn't work that way. There aren't centralized data repositories that even can be joined, in many cases. Even when they could be (by batch/paper-form request/extremely slow system integration) joined conceptually, many decades of inertia, law, regulation, and political opposition often prevent those interconnections from existing. Even when they are permitted to exist, they're usually implemented in extremely broken ways.
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 even the right stance to take, but it definitely has a cost.
Not really. In my country there's no need to do an initial registration, and there isn't any kind of "voter roll purging" or having to redo it every few years to make sure it is constant. It basically Just Works without ever having to think about it.
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.
I know, I was making fun of it. It's a "'no way to solve this', says only country which hasn't solved it yet" kind of problem which exists solely due to American exceptionalism.
The US doesn't have a population register in the same way as European countries do.
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.
Thats not how it works. You usually have a few places you can vote in, and there is a list of names that are checked, then you vote.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
It's a spectrum, not a binary. We're really far from the "packing bags and leaving the country" end where you're a slave to the state. America is nothing like an Iran or China where we have no power and no rights to overturn the state.
Let's see if any of these petty games helps Trump with midterms. I highly doubt it. Kalshi is already calling it a double win for Democrats.
The economic impact of the Iran War looks like it really cost Trump everything. And it's funny because he always campaigned on not getting into wars.
China doesn't seem that bad in most respects either. Only in freedom of speech, and resulting internet censorship, but in quality of life and in productivity they seem to be thoroughly pwning the USA.
> We're really far from the packing bags and leaving the country end.
Some of my American friends in Canada have taken in American friends who left so quick they didn't have a long-term place to land yet. Whether you have packed your bags and left, that depends who you are. It's not a flood, but an exodus has begun amongst those whose lives have been disrupted: academics, trans, queer, etc
> Kalshi is already calling it a double win for Democrats.
It's quite common for Kalshi bets to go from <1% to 100% chance in minutes when news breaks. "Prediction markets" is almost Orwellian in its inaccuracy.
The judge's decision was not a free speech argument, but a due process one. Rights were taken away without warning, or opportunity to argue or appeal. That sounds like arbitrary executive rule.
I was always taught that the executive branch enforces the law, not interprets it. If the executive branch or legislative branches disagree with the judicial branch, then they have the responsibility to appeal or deal with it; they can't just ignore it because they disagree.
It turns out that in the end, enforcement is the only thing that matters. Written law doesn't matter, and interpretation doesn't matter, except insofar as they affect enforcement.
Perhaps the next president will wave the magic executive order wand and reduce the age of eligibility for Medicare to zero. Or something else equally spicy and very progressive. Republicans used to understand that eventually the other side will win an election and do unto you everything you have done unto them, but apparently the current crop thinks they will be ruling forever.
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.
Or maybe I'm confusing incompetence with malice. Maybe they want to lose and be the spoiler party.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Now you get it.
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.
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.
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 intentionally designed to make less people vote.
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...
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.
Voter registration is mandatory in France.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 go away at all.
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.)
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/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 even the right stance to take, but it definitely has a cost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And apparently they sometimes get lost or processed incorrectly, leaving people disenfranchised.
[1] https://www.votebeat.org/texas/2026/09/23/dps-error-backlogg...
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.
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?
It's a spectrum, not a binary. We're really far from the "packing bags and leaving the country" end where you're a slave to the state. America is nothing like an Iran or China where we have no power and no rights to overturn the state.
Let's see if any of these petty games helps Trump with midterms. I highly doubt it. Kalshi is already calling it a double win for Democrats.
The economic impact of the Iran War looks like it really cost Trump everything. And it's funny because he always campaigned on not getting into wars.
Some of my American friends in Canada have taken in American friends who left so quick they didn't have a long-term place to land yet. Whether you have packed your bags and left, that depends who you are. It's not a flood, but an exodus has begun amongst those whose lives have been disrupted: academics, trans, queer, etc
Are we now? https://trends.google.com/explore?q=how%2520to%2520emigrate&...
Yeah
It's quite common for Kalshi bets to go from <1% to 100% chance in minutes when news breaks. "Prediction markets" is almost Orwellian in its inaccuracy.
Which is the precise problem with the "prediction" markets writ large. Some things just... aren't.
> Judges are not all-powerful dictators.
No, but the three branches are (in theory) co-equal, which makes that also apply to said White House.
Yes, Federal judges are part of the judicial branch.