Voter Registration - Why is it Necessary?

[Ririon]

A lot of resources are going into registering voters in the USA as I write this. Thousands of people (volunteers and professionals), tons of paper, hours and hours of work. On top of it all, you have "fraud" where disney characters and random people from the telephone book are being registered.

Why? This does not have to be an issue at all!

Let me tell you about how this works in another country. I know, Norway and the USA are a couple of orders of magnitude different when it comes to their populations, and the USA is not a homogenous country and all that, but at least this could be scaled up to a state level in North Dakota or something, if a federal system seems impossible.

OK, here it goes:

Everybody is registered in a national register as living at a particular address. If you move, you update this registration.

When election day comes, you are automatically registered to vote at the voting station closest to this address if you qualify (are over 18 etc.). If it is a local election, you are registered to vote in the municipality/region/county of this address.

That is it. Simple.

[Oliver]

Same in Canada, Germany, UK, France...
Does anyone know a parliamentary western country in which this isn't the case?

[chipmunk stew]

If the past two US presidential elections and the current mistrust on both sides have taught us anything about the voting process, it should be that the opt-in system sucks.

I think the ostensible reason behind it is that forcing people to opt in requires some effort on their part and therefore instills some sense of civic responsibility in the voter. I think the insidious underlying historical reason, still alive to some extent today, is that it has allowed people in power to exclude or limit classes of people from voting.

edit: Americans are also more skittish than other Western populations about national registries of any sort.

[Ririon]

I see the paranoia thing, just based on american popular culture.

But you do have social security numbers. All citizens at least. Does this mean that The Man knows your name and number, but not where you live?

Then why is it OK that Department of Motor Vehicles know your address and your weight among other things? (Based on my experience with California DMV.)

Since the required information is already registered at the DMV for almost every citizen over 16 (they also make very handy identification cards if you don't have a driver's license)... Why not fix it?

Right wing lobby afraid to have more "inner city" (and other eufemisms) people vote, since they generally vote democratic?

Left wing lobby afraid they will lose all the funds they can spread around these days to register voters?

The goventment now has to check every single voter registration (AFAIK on paper) every single election. This MUST cost more than having a state or federal register running.

Are there some legal issues that block common sense here? Some amendment about having the right not to be in a register, maybe?

[Smackety]

People don't want to serve jury duty.

ETA: Yes, that is the best reason I can come up with.

[gtc]

Same in Canada, Germany, UK, France...
Does anyone know a parliamentary western country in which this isn't the case?

We have had this discussion before in another thread. Australia is like the US, where there is no single national database. If I move, I am expected to register my change of address with the state government department that issued my drivers licence within a certain period of time and my chemist and doctor usually ask me if I have moved (but I don't know if that is for their records or the central medicare database). We don't have to get a driver's licence and I am not sure that we have to register changes of address with medicare either.

If you introduce a single government database you won't prevent fraudalent voter registrations as people will just try to fraudently create entries in the single government database. There would also be a hideous expense involved in creating such a database, securing it and forcing the 300 and something million Americans to register themselves.