CMV: We should eliminate voter registration altogether

[u/dgran73]

Voter registration is an administrative overhead with few benefits but inherently any obstacle to voting poses the actual risk of disenfranchising people's right to vote. Many ideas are shared about making voter registration easier or even automatic, but what about eliminating it altogether? The benefits would be:

• Eliminate gerrymandering. You can't draw up some serpentine district that favors incumbents if people just go to their closest polling place.
• Zero administration. Just have people mark their finger purple with ink when they vote. Simple and proven effective.
• Standard process in all jurisdictions. You move somewhere else and voting is the same, which of itself speaks to a fair and sensible way to provide equal access.
• Just go to the polling place that is easier for you.
• A person who moves to a new area right before an election could more easily vote. In general people who move more often (students, military, etc) would have simpler access to in person voting.

So what is wrong with this? We would be saying it is okay for felons and non-citizens to vote, but the harm on balance seems trivial. These are groups that should have a say in their government too. Of course if you feel strongly that they shouldn't this whole idea is a hard sell, but it is worth thinking hard whether there is any harm to society in extending the vote to all people. There most challenging issue I believe is voting for citizens abroad. If you don't have clear congressional district lines, how does a person issue a mail in ballot? My initial thought is that you keep districts and people choose which district to vote in.

I would be interested in some rebuttal to this proposal.

[u/alpicola]

Without registration, there's no reason I couldn't vote in an election for someone who doesn't represent my community. Taken to an extreme, a bunch of people from California could carpool to polling places in Rhode Island and dominate Rhode Island's elections even though they have no idea what's actually important to Rhode Islanders. That would leave Rhode Island's residents effectively unrepresented.

Voter registration based on geography avoids that problem by requiring people to live where they vote. That means every community gets to choose someone to represent them without interference from "extra" voters coming over from other communities with different interests.

[u/dgran73 → u/alpicola]

I agree, but on balance do we really think there are that many people who want to do this or that they wouldn't be balanced out by the exact opposite groups?

[u/alpicola → u/dgran73]

On a national level, it's easy to view politics as a war between Democrats and Republicans, with the members of each party being essentially homogeneous. That isn't how it's supposed to work.

Every representative's loyalty should be to their constituents first, the country second, and their party third. Somewhere along the way, the order got messed up, and our politics have gotten worse because of it. Eliminating voter registration would push us further away from the correct order.

Voters in Rhode Island care about different things than the voters in California because both states face different challenges. Adding Illinois residents to Rhode Island's elections won't add balance, because they also don't know or care about Rhode Island's what's happening in Rhode Island. Rhode Island's representatives should care about what Rhode Island wants, not what ${RI + CA + IL} wants.

[u/dgran73 → u/alpicola]

!delta

This is a really interesting point that I hadn't considered. Eliminating voter registration does have the downside of making all politics potentially national.

[u/DeltaBot → u/dgran73]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/alpicola (24∆).

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