this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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Explain Like I'm 5 (ELI5)
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Lot of dumb comments here. Everyone in a country with voting registers to vote, you just may not realize it. In order to vote in an election, the government needs to know that 1) you are a citizen, 2) you are alive, and 3) where you live so they know you can vote in that local district.
Ask yourself, if you moved across your country, how would you vote in those local elections? The answer is that you would register to vote there. You may not see it that way, cause that "registration" may be dual purposed with some other act (like getting a new drivers license), but you are letting the government know you can vote there. Most places in the US (at least everywhere I've lived, I think) allowed me to register to vote when I got my new ID.
The thing that makes it a little different in the US is that registering to vote isn't strictly tied to anything else. If you move from one city to another within the same state, or if you choose not to get a new drivers license in a new state, the government will have no clue where you live. You aren't required to give the government that information. The only time you have to give the government an address is to file taxes (maybe not even then). That doesn't occur until spring, so if you move in the summer, there's no way for the government to know that you can vote in a different place if you don't tell them.
Not really. Where I'm from(Eastern Europe) as long as you're of legal age and have a valid ID, you can vote, you don't need to register anywhere. Now, for local (mayor, city council, etc) and parliamentary elections you can vote only in the district to which you belong, as per the home address you have in your ID. For presidential an European parliamentary elections, you can vote ANYWHERE. So no one registers anywhere.
So, changing the address on your ID serves as a change of registration. Which is what he said and exactly how it works where I am in the US.
I’m not sure how that would work: is your vote tied to your identity?
Having a registration of all legal voters allows you to verify people only vote once, only legitimate votes are counted, and your vote can be anonymous.
No one knows who I voted for (except probably all of Lemmy, lmao), but on my way in I verified who I am, and they checked off that I was listed as a voter, and checked me off as having voted.
There is a check via an ID scanner before going into the voting booth that ensures you've only voted once. No one know who I voted for either. The only downside to this is that if you haven't updated your ID when changing address, you would have to go to the district on your ID to vote. This somehow makes sense since for parliamentary elections, for example, you have different candidates for different districts.
In cases like that for us, I think there’s some sort of provisional voting where you cast your ballot but it’s not counted until everything checks out. In your example, perhaps they’d confirm you moved and make sure you only voted in the one location. It’s not something they can do immediately though. However I’ve never had reason to find out the details on this so I may be a bit off base
It sounds like you are from a country that requires you to have an ID. So effectively, you are required to register to vote by getting an ID. In the US, you are not required to have an ID, so the government has no way of knowing your home address by default.