Do Americans realise how absolutely insane the very concept of “purging a voter registration list” is? You have to *register to vote*? What are you even talking about?
Are you a citizen? Then you should automatically get a vote. There isn’t anything to administer. You live there. The government serves you; not you it. Voting isn’t supposed to be a privilege, or reward.
The obvious abuse vector that any system other than “all citizens vote” becomes is astounding.
You appear to be under the impression that there’s some master list of US citizens somewhere, or some universal documentation that all of them have.
Voter registration lists - really citizen-domiciles-within-the-voting-area lists - exist because there’s literally no other way to get this information.
@cerebrate Ask yourself how it works in other countries.
Of course there is a list of people eligible to vote; my point is that every single citizen should default be on that list - and removed only when dead (or moved out of state - and auto enrolled in the other state). How is that tracked? Same way taxes are. Or births. Or social security. The info is already there.
With respect, ask yourself if all countries have similar or identical forms of public administration. (Having changed countries a couple of times, I can guarantee you that they don't.)
And I can also promise you that no such list exists.
You may think that this implies some terrible, fundamental dysfunction in American public administration, and by most standards you'd be right, but that doesn't mean it's not the case.
@cerebrate Oh no of course - the point tho is that it’s a solved problem and just needs the willpower to make it so elsewhere.
(1/2) In theory, yeah, fair, but in practice you have to appreciate the sheer magnitude of the refactoring of the us.gov this would mean.
To exemplify, currently, if you want to find out if someone is a US citizen, you start out by trying to find a birth certificate in one of thousands of different county courthouses, many of which are still using paper records, and then _not_ find a matching certificate likewise in one of the same places...
(2/3) Then check naturalization records and the State Department's files on people who have formally renounced their citizenship, and you _might_ have got about 95% of the way there.
@mattwilcox
(3/3) Your second best option is checking Social Security numbers, except it's illegal and doubly so for the government to use those for anything that isn't Social Security, because that was instituted in a time in which anything that looked like a national ID was _clearly_ a Nazi/communist plot and no-one's going to show anyone their papers, dammit.
(A position that still has a lot of mindshare.)
So, y'know. We're talking about a This Defines My Entire Career level of willpower.