Can an American explain to me why is "registering to vote" even a thing in the first place?
If an election is coming up in my country, everyone eligible to vote just gets a letter containing information about the election. We can vote in designated places without this official letter, with just showing an ID that has the social security number and photo.
With the general trend (in most countries I guess) of badly educated and/or poor people not voting, I can only imagine how many skip voting because they just didn't bother to register.
EDIT Thanks everyone for the enlightening comments (which I got way more than what I expected!) regarding the US system (and the systems of some other countries too!), always interesting to learn more. For those who asked, I'm from Finland which is a small country, so naturally a more reasonable comparison would be one country vs. one State in the US, not the whole federal level which (as many stated here) creates whole new challenges for arranging a nationwide election.
Reading about the ways to make registration more difficult for minorities to prevent them from voting sounds just awful, but totally believable I'm afraid...
late Middle English: from Old French regestre or medieval Latin regestrum, registrum, alteration of regestum, singular of late Latin regesta ‘things recorded’, from regerere ‘enter, record’.
Leonarr on October 24th, 2019 at 08:45 UTC »
Can an American explain to me why is "registering to vote" even a thing in the first place?
If an election is coming up in my country, everyone eligible to vote just gets a letter containing information about the election. We can vote in designated places without this official letter, with just showing an ID that has the social security number and photo.
With the general trend (in most countries I guess) of badly educated and/or poor people not voting, I can only imagine how many skip voting because they just didn't bother to register.
EDIT Thanks everyone for the enlightening comments (which I got way more than what I expected!) regarding the US system (and the systems of some other countries too!), always interesting to learn more. For those who asked, I'm from Finland which is a small country, so naturally a more reasonable comparison would be one country vs. one State in the US, not the whole federal level which (as many stated here) creates whole new challenges for arranging a nationwide election.
Reading about the ways to make registration more difficult for minorities to prevent them from voting sounds just awful, but totally believable I'm afraid...
sloth_in_the_middle on October 24th, 2019 at 09:36 UTC »
It takes talent to be so confident, yet so wrong.
ALG0R1DDUM on October 24th, 2019 at 09:42 UTC »
Dont you legally have to vote in Australia?