It’s really unfortunate that you have the burden of proving that your information is correct. It took me about 6/7 weeks to complete the entire process.
They also mail you a voter registration card (which itself isn’t useful anywhere), and if, for any reason, it doesn’t reach you, your name will be suspended from the list.
The whole process feels like it’s designed to discourage people from voting.
Or maybe I'm confusing incompetence with malice. Maybe they want to lose and be the spoiler party.
That's not true. If it's a company doing it, you have the choice to not be a customer of the company. Don't give them any of your money if you don't like how they do business.
The same can't be said of government. If you don't give your money, in the form of taxes, you go to jail.
Possible, but I doubt it. I've worked on the systems that do things like ID correlation/verification on the backend. They're ... imagine the most broken possible implementation you've ever worked on, then imagine it worse, then imagine that it's maintained by entirely different contractors than the ones that built it, with minimal incentive for improvement.
That's most of government IT implementations, and has been for decades.
Even when specific systems in this area are implemented well, the regulatory/bureaucratic complexity of the government prevents them from being more than marginally useful at best. I expanded more on some of the concerns/issues in this area in an adjacent comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832393
To me the whole system with voter registration and all other jazz, seems designed to indeed discourage people from voting. Why wouldn't you want it to be efficient and simple otherwise?
It is, with specific emphasis on discouraging people in cities from voting. The state has done all sorts of fuckery to limit the ability of people in urban centers from having any voice in government. Some of the most incredible gerrymanders in the country, limits on voting locations and times imposed specifically on large cities, many small frictions to make voting more time-consuming and expensive.
It's why they can get away with naked corruption and bumbling incompetence and still retain a firm hold on power. Well, that, and copious oil billionaire money flowing to Texas elections.
Now you get it.
And apparently they sometimes get lost or processed incorrectly, leaving people disenfranchised.
[1] https://www.votebeat.org/texas/2026/09/23/dps-error-backlogg...
As a TX resident possibly affected by this, I for one am grateful for my neighbors at the local election office working hard to get this resolved.
And, what would have happened had journalist not discovered it a couple of months before the election? Would those registrations have just been lost until after?
And that's the issue right? All your points on what could have happened are good points - but this really does seem like the kind of bug that shows up even in systems implemented by competent people. As the most likely interpretation, I'll give my neighbors the benefit of the doubt. If we can't trust our neighbors to (mostly) do the right thing, but suspect foul play for every hiccup, then our republic really does have a problem.
If we had evidence that it _was_ intentional sabotage, well then - this situation would look rather different. Probably worse than picante sauce from New York City [1].
The red states, Republicans use it as a tool to reduce participation of urban, non-white voters and reduce overall participation. They don't consider systematic, passive voter suppression techniques to be voter fraud.
However, now I live in New York, where they seem to go out of their way to make it difficult. The registration cutoff is several weeks before the election and for at least one election, I found myself wrongfully expunged from the voter roles.
I think it may just be how corrupt the state government is.
The registration process is mostly a legacy system to ensure only qualified individuals vote, left over from a time when the bar was much higher.
The US was organized around a very limited federal government (this has changed over time). Each state is responsible for elections within the state. There's no exact national registry of citizens, although Social Security keeps a de facto registry as most citizens are enumerated by that administration and their records include citizenship indication. Strictly speaking, registration with social security is not mandatory, it is required for employees and a child must be registered to qualify for tax credits and it makes administrative tasks simpler.
Within each state, voting is typically administered by county (or similar level) offices; although I think many states have a state wide process to register.
A given voter will vote for many positions (and often some propositions), and electoral boundaries for positions don't necessarily align with anything else or each other. So there's a lot of complexity there.
The residence address of the voter is the important thing that decides which elections they can participate in, but since there is no real registry of residence (de facto or de jure), it needs to be collected seperately.
[1] https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/R1...
The drivers license database is the defaco registry of where you live and most states require you to update your address within 2 weeks of moving (although enforcement is loose). There is a state identification card for those who don't drive that fulfills the same purpose as a drivers license.
Since RealID states now have to check immigration status if you request a RealID license (some states will issue non-RealID drivers licenses to the undocumented). There is a further Enhanced ID check that some states do that will indicate that you are a US citizen on the license. RealID and non RealID licenses are clearly marked.
Basically true voter fraud is largely a non issue because the States generally have their systems together. Voter suppression, which is the goal of most of the voting related legislation of the last 20 years, is however rampant.
Voter registration is mandatory in France.
Conservatives attempted to copy the US voter ID requirements, but without realizing that the underlying demographic distribution of ID is different, and besides you can just postal vote anyway.
Do you speak for all of Europe? Or do different countries in Europe have different approaches to voting? What you are missing is that this is similar to the US in that we have fifty different States each of which handle voting their own way. There is no singular answer at the federal level, though some people are trying to push in that direction.
Stopping voter fraud really isn't that difficult. Just don't over-complicate it with silly things like electronic voting machines or mass mail-in voting and there's not a lot that can go wrong.
The problem is that they aren't interconnected in any meaningful way by design so the bulk of the work gets pushed onto states. Real ID forced a lot of the states to get their act together but it's still a bit of a goat rodeo in places.
And it isn't even a secret. You can find quotes where politicians talk openly about it. I'm trying to be neutral here but when I say "politicians" I mean within one party.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/when...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/inside-house-republicans-pl...
https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/historyvotersuppression/web...
So who gets to determine what counts as "some effort"? Is putting voter registration behind a Rube Goldberg machine enough, or should we go for an IQ test? How about sitting in a room for 72 consecutive hours before being able to cast your vote? Should we perhaps "grandfather in" people who have already proven to be trustworthy as well?
Voting is a fundamental human right. If politicians can make rules deciding who gets to vote, then those politicians will disenfranchise people voting for their opponents. The only solution is to make sure everyone can vote - including the "undesirables" like dumb people and prisoners.
Obvious example: you spelled "ought" wrong, this means that according to my arbitrary rules passed by a democratically-elected government you are not smart enough to vote. And no, you can't change the rules: you'd first have to elect a different government, which you can't do because you can't vote.
The Democrat Party, as an organization, exists first and foremost to fundraise and the best way to do that is to seek corporate donors, thanks to Citizens United, since its easier to court one or two very large donations than hundreds or thousands of small individual donors.
What happens politically and the resultant laws are basically secondary. You, the taxpayer, doesn’t pay the DNC to do its job. Donors do.
They favor keeping the system that is producing rampant inequity stable. With a laissez faire approach to social issues.
As opposed to republicans, who favor socially regressive and oppressive policies, double speak, and who's mantra is mostly "Don't get caught. But if you do get caught - deny, deflect, denounce" rather than anything resembling ethical behavior.
Neither of them are particularly good options for governance. They have no motivations to "learn" anything.
One is a fast moving, malignant cancer - the other a slow moving auto-immune disease. Both kill the host.
We desperately need fresh air.
Re: the draft - if you are eligible for it you have to register to it, just like voter registration except it's mandatory. If you don't register for selective service you can't get federal college loans IIRC. You also have to register for the draft to apply for a green card?
There's also birth certificates, which are state-based databases, AFAIK, so there is that route too, and that process is more along the lines of how we're a federation.
(& for voter registration, probably the most common method, at least IME, is to bootstrap that from your state license/ID; since those are generally REAL IDs now, most individuals would provide birth cert and SSN, since that is the most broadly fulfillable requirement of REAL ID.)
Illegal immigrant voted: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/colombian-national-plea...
6,600 noncitizens registered, 400 noncitizens voted, undisclosed how many, if any, are unlawfully in country: https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2026/6600-nonci...
Right, but even for Peruvians, you show up at the both, make your vote and leave, that's it. No thresholds for registering or other stuff, just you and your ID making a vote, even when outside the country. It again makes the US system seem intentionally designed to make less people vote.
If a bunch of politicians can make voting quasi-impossible for certain groups of people by meddling with their polling stations, then you don't have a functioning democracy.
I have trouble believing that, given that the "design", such as it is, took place over many decades of inter-agency regulatory/technical wrangling and organic growth.
At different times and points, the people that built what we think of as "the voting system" had totally different goals. Sometimes those goals were "make sure everyone eligible can vote as easily as possible"--and that's laudable! But more often the goals were "build $niche_system_component to comply with $specific_regulation". The number of times, during the design phase, where the people planning actually wanted to suppress votes and were empowered to make a part of the system actually do that was probably a rounding error compared to times when people fully accidentally moved the system in that direction due to bureaucratic myopia and shitty implementation.
I'm all for blaming political actors for things they intentionally do that are bad! Defunding the EPA? Bad! Getting into stupid wars? Bad! Banning mail-in voting? Bad! People with power and pre-meditated goals did those things, and many more, and should be opposed for it.
But "voting system is broken due to bureaucratic inter-operation failures, and state government staff have to do a postmortem and data recovery (ballot reprocessing)" isn't one of those times.
Until 2013, some states were under Federal preclearance rules because those "totally different goals" were historically "don't let black people vote".
But "racist state officials did voter suppression" is a different failure mode of the system than "data system corrupted registrations and now they're scrambling to fix the damage".
The malicious-officials problem has fixes like "vote people out" and "decommission harmful programs" and "restore cut funding".
The busted-data-system problem has fixes like "national ID card system" or "remove regulations preventing effective data sharing" or "hold system implementors responsible for failures".
If you see the disenfranchisement/conspiracy of the former in the bureaucratic/tech debt of the latter, you'll fix the wrong problems in the wrong ways, and make things worse.
Ah yes, 2026 America, famous for its wealth of commercial competition and diversity of business practices. Just the other day I was bragging to my friends how many reasonable options I have for so many of my critical necessities, including televisions and other cheap plastic cheap manufactured in China and white-labeled by glorified dropshippers.
The corporations are quickly becoming the government you are so quick to demonize. The death panels that FoxNews spoke about 24/7 back in 2010 are now embedded into our insurance industry, except you have no democratic recourse and will be statistically drained of your wealth before your offspring have a chance to inherit it, all while they watch you die and stress over the Byzantine processes that are “economically efficient”.
Luigi didn't trigger any sort of mass uprising against the elites, didn't inspire copycats or revolutionaries. No reform of insurance or pharma costs occurred, all of the problems he ostensibly opposed are still there. He just got arrested and became a meme for a while.
So, there has been a shift in our shared reality. Maybe not as significant as something like 9/11, but maybe an order of magnitude or two below it.