For what reasons was voter registration instituted in the US?
For what reasons is it retained?
My uneducated hunch is that it was originally required back in the olden days of where information travelled at the pace of mules which might have made sense then. Today, it seems to be retained because it lowers voter turn out which is good for incumbents, especially Republican ones. I’m sure incumbents/Republicans have some dubious reasoning as to why it should be retained.
Only people who meet the legal requirements to vote should vote. Assuming those requirements aren’t BS and are logical, such as live in the jurisdiction, are of age, are not adjudged incompetent, etc.
The only way to know if someone meets those requirements is to have them present some sorts of proof, then conduct some level of investigation. That might be real hard to implement in real time on voting day scaled up to every eligible voter. Doing that work over all the months between elections might be easier / smarter.
Another logical reason, albeit probably technologically obsolete now, is to preclude someone showing up at multiple polling places and voting in each. Only if you recorded that Joe Smith already voted in location 1 can you detect that him trying to vote in location 2 is wrong / illegal. Having a registration record already made up that you can check off helps.
Lots of states have walk-up registration now. So clearly it can be done without if enough of the other backshop work to support it is already in place.
I have registered to vote in three states (PA, NY, and IL) and they never asked for proof of anything. Nor ID to vote, IIRC. Here in Canada, you can register when you file your tax return. But they do require ID to vote. But every resident has a health card. I am really not sure what voter registration is supposed to accomplish.
You want to have a comprehensive list of who is allowed to vote and who has voted so you can reduce fraud. I’m not exactly sure how the same-day registration that many states do works, but presumably they must either have a real-time connection to some central server/service that can verify that the person trying to same-day register hasn’t already done so at another location earlier in the day, or they must set all the same-day ballots aside for later verification and if they find that one person voted multiple times, they’ll have some ‘splainin’ to do.
It’s true that there’s very little of the sort of election fraud that registering to vote is trying to eliminate (individual people going around to different polling places and casting multiple ballots), which is why the various Republican attempts to make registration or voting a more onerous process are in bad faith. But it also doesn’t follow that we should or could eliminate the registration process. A lot of the reason we have very little of that fraud is that we figured out a system to prevent it and it works well!
It’s like the thread about Costco receipt checkers. Yeah, they catch almost no theft attempts, but that’s because all the thefts they would attempt aren’t done. If you got rid of the process, you likely would see more thefts/fraud.
You don’t have to show ID to vote in NY - but you do have to provide some sort of identification to register. I don’t remember what I had to show when I registered long ago , but now you can provide your drivers license or non-driver ID number or your SS number when you register ( they will accept other documents if you don’t have any of those). The DL/ID* or SS should allow them to verify age and citizenship.