Not the point. A lot of poor people do. They can lose their right to vote. They can get thrown in jail. Poor people, for some reason, do not trust the court system.
The case you cite is about a poll tax for not voting. And it is based on the Missouri Constitution. And it was not appealed to the Supreme Court, so it did not have the opportunity to overrule it.
The also see doesn’t mention any legal arguments against mandatory voting, much less mandatory registration.
I think you’d have a pretty tough time arguing that mandatory registration is unconstitutional. Your best bets would be that there is some First Amendment right to express your disapproval by not registering, or some substantive due process right about not being in a national database. But I think both arguments are probably losers.
Why? Like any issue that faces society we need to decide where to best spend limited resources to address a problem. At some point you reach a law of diminishing returns point where even massive infusions of resources produce barely noticeable results.
I think you are creating a false dilemma by suggesting voter fraud is something that needs to be addressed. The facts are it is such an insignificant issue as to be virtually a non-issue. By all means the checks that are in place should (largely) remain but they seem more than sufficient as is without throwing yet more money and more roadblocks to voting.
As has been cited numerous times in this thread voter roll purging, often in violation of the law, disenfranchises huge swaths of voters who, far more often than not, tend to be left leaning.
That’s an interesting theory you’ve got there a poll tax for not voting is not about mandatory voting? Where I come from if you are punished for not doing something that means doing it is mandatory.
As for its not being appealed we have a term for that, settled law.
Furthermore, it is conservatives who fight tooth and nail to keep the riff raff from voting and bemoaning things like the motor voter law. Conservatives are the most up in arms against mandatory registration. If you briefly glance at the make up of the current supreme court I think you will find that the likelyhood of them permitting it is slightly greater than them overturning Bush v Gore.
Where did I say it wasn’t about mandatory voting? The case clearly was. The “also see” cite was not.
I was responding to your argument that SCOTUS has never overruled it. They couldn’t have. And one state supreme court decision from the 19th century doesn’t mean the law is settled. It is binding on the lower courts of that state, for now. That is not what is generally meant by “settled law,” and certainly not what is meant by “settled law” in the context of the entire nation.
Not that it matters because that case is about voting, not registration.
So to return to my original question, what would be their constitutional basis?
So. Keeping the Sabbath holy is a choice, but it would be obviously wrong to require Saturday voting. At some point, you have to stop bending over backwards to accommodate people’s irrationality , but there really needs to be some effort made to keep polling places from appearing to be a convenient place for the authorities to check in on anyone who’s had some run-in with the law. I don’t have any good way to draw a decent balance, though it seems the Census Bureau has good practices in place to get accurate data while maintaining its secrecy. That might be a good place to look for ideas.