Problems With Our System of Voter Registration

You might want to take a look at this report from Pew Research from 2012 on the problems with the U. S. system of voter registration. It’s pretty eye-opening. Among their findings:

  • An eighth of registrations are in error in one form or another.
  • About 1% of all registered voters are deceased.
  • About 2% of voters are registered to vote in more than one state.
  • Our system or, rather, lack of system is absurdly antiquated and expensive.

That’s a bit worse than my little anecdotal observations. What we saw was that about 2% of registrations in our precinct were in error. Of course, our precinct is a very orderly one.

On top of all of this many jurisdictions have no way of detecting invalid registrations. It’s really a mess.

3 comments… add one
  • Steve Link

    People live nationally but register locally. Probably need to make registration a federal responsibility.

    Steve

  • Probably need to make registration a federal responsibility.

    Alternatively, the federal government could provide resources accessible by state and local governments. Web services, for example. A communications portal.

  • Andy Link

    People live nationally? Not anywhere I’ve lived.

    I think the feds could create a registration system for federal elections but I’m not sure they could force states to adopt it but the feds could probably use extortion – Making federal funds for something-or-other dependent on adopting the system. I think states would join up and eventually use it for state and local elections too.

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