I have been a volunteer voting official often in Germany, and it’s like constanze says (only the 3 month residence requirement does not apply to all elections - state and local elections are governed by state law so it’s different in the 16 states.)
Problems about would be voters not being on the register are very rare - usually they are just mistaken in the polling station and we send them next door according to their address (we get an street vs. polling station directory for such cases). Sometimes people moved last week and did not change their registration yet; in these cases we call city hall and send them on to their old polling station.
1400 eligible voters per polling station is a bit on the high side in my experience BTW - I got between 200-1000 registered voters in the polling stations I worked in.
The only occasional problem we encounter is not about registration but about getting some old married couples to vote separately. In the last election but one my chief election official called to an old couple “Sie müssen bitte in getrennte Urnen” (you must go into separate urns please) instead of “Sie müssen bitte in getrennte Kabinen” (you must go into separate booths please) - followed by a red face and embarassed silence.
Don’t know about the US, but up here employers are required to provide employees with X number of hours off to vote (I forget how many X is, but it’s supposed to be enough time so you can’t reasonably say you didn’t have time to vote).
In South Africa, the locations that will be polling stations are opened as registration locations for a period of about a week, a few months before the election date. You only have to register if you’ve never registered before, or if you’ve moved from one voting district to another. To register, you just have to show your national identity document; the election official scans it with a barcode reader and prints a label which is stuck to a page in the national ID (the ID is a book like a passport, only smaller). At any other time, you can register by going to the local municipal offices (although registration is not allowed after the President proclaims the election date, to allow time for the electoral rolls to be compiled).
The system is not particularly careful to ensure that voters register in the district where they actually live, but it does prevent them from registering more than once (using the unique ID number). This is not really a problem, since our electoral system is based on proportional representation, not constituencies.
I was born and voted in the US before moving to Canada. It is obvious to me that the purpose of the US voter registration is to prevent people from voting. This was obvious in the south before the civil rights acts of the 50s and 60s, but is still what is behind the various states attempts to prevent people who don’t have photo IDs (which cost money and are not easy to get) from voting.
When i first moved to Canada, every time there was an election, either federal or provincial, someone came to the door to register my wife and me. They were disappointed when I told them we weren’t citizens and sometimes we got in the list anyway (from information supplied by a neighbor if we weren’t home), although we never voted (which would have been illegal). (A cabinet minister a Quebec government was forced to resign because she wasn’t a citizen, which was because she refused to swear allegiance to the queen at naturalization, but was never prosecuted for voting illegally.)
In the recent federal election, the poll workers tried to prevent a friend of mine from voting because he refused to give his (unlisted) phone number. He said, “My father fought in WWII so that we wouldn’t be governed by people like you.” They finally decided they had no legal right to stop him.
Canada used to, but the Supreme Court has ruled that infringes the constitutional right of “every citizen” to vote, set out in s. 3 of the Charter of Rights. See: Sauvé v. Canada (Chief Electoral Officer).
I don’t think there’s any requirement here, although some employers may do so. Elections are always held on Saturdays, so that makes it a lot easier for most people. And it’s very easy to cast a pre-poll vote, or arrange for a postal vote, if you know you’re going to be tied up working on election day itself.
And although Australia has a much higher percentage of valid votes cast than the US, apparently due to compulsory voting, many countries with simple registration systems have similar numbers to Australia.
Election day in Israel is a national holiday - not only to allow everyone to vote, but also because we believe that democracy is something worth celebrating.
And if you’re lucky, they might even not be on strike when you get there!
As for registering Democrat or Republican, some states allow you to register with a party if you so choose. I used to be registered as a Democrat in California, but then they pissed me off, so I reregistered as a Green. (Which meant I couldn’t vote in the Democratic primary anymore.) In Illinois and Michigan, the two states I have lived in most recently, you can’t register with a party at all, so in theory we’re all independents, but, at least in Illinois, when you show up to vote in the primary, you have to choose a party ballot. So even though I usually vote Democrat, I could have selected the Republican ballot and voted for the looniest and least likely to win candidates, just to fuck up their election (although I’ve never and would never do this). Sometimes you hear about this kind of scheming, but I don’t know that it’s ever had much of an effect.
There is a central registry of citizens called Folkeregisteret, shared by all government agencies, with information about each person including his current address and his date of birth. When you move, it’s your responsibility to make sure the new information is entered into that registry. So the election authorities should always have access to your current address, and they also will be automatically informed when you turn 18.
I don’t know exactly how things work if you move to a different election district just before an election, but I’m sure there’s a system in place for these things.
Australians serving prison sentences of over three years are ineligible to vote. If the sentence is under three years (or if the individual is on remand), they are eligible* to vote.
*Eligibility to vote in Australia = “It’s compulsory”.
It’s even simpler to register in the UK now. When you receive the form through the post you are also given a password which you can use to register on-line instead of posting off the form. I have used this method for the last couple of years with no problems.