Explain Like I'm 5 (ELI5)

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ELI5 why do people in USA need to register to vote? (self.eli5)

submitted 1 month ago by verstra to c/[email protected]

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I'd expect the state to have a list of all its citizens and their basic personal info (age) which could be used to determine their eligibility for voting. In my country, we get a "invitation" to the vote, with your voter station and info on how to change it.

Instead, I'm seeing posts about USA's "voter rolls", which are sometimes purged, which prevents people from voting. Isn't this an attack on the voting system and democracy itself?

So why doesn't USA have a list of voters? Are they stupid?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

It's not usually explicitly done as a separate step in the States. When most people move, they just check a box to register to vote when they are getting their new ID.

The reason that it can be a separate step is that there's nothing requiring you to have an ID if you don't want to have one, and the people most likely to not have an ID are poor/homeless/otherwise disadvantaged. That's when you need to explicitly provide your local election people with some kind of proof of identification and proof of address.