Edit/Update: It turns out that my last name has a capitol letter in the middle and they put a space in it. Thank god. I can actually vote this year.
Edit/Update: It turns out that my last name has a capitol letter in the middle and they put a space in it. Thank god. I can actually vote this year.
Imagine you moved countries, and were entitled to vote in both.
You have to tell the new country you exist there.
That’s the most common failure mode in the US, when you move states or even counties and there’s a miscommunication or lack of communication between where you came from and where you are. There is no top level federal voter database.
There are other issues, but this is the most common.
You don’t vote at a federal level, you vote at a state level, for federal stuff. (And state/local stuff)
I think for most people in the US when you move you have to get a new driver’s license, and that process also lets you register to vote as an automatic bonus if you check a box saying you want it
Some states have lifetime DL terms, while others are still ridiculously long.
Not every adult has a driver’s licence.
True, and that is an issue, but I guess the main thing I’m getting at is that despite voter registration not being a unified system a majority of people moving between states aren’t going to be deterred from registering by a Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth.
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As I said, federal government doesn’t handle this. So the IRS is involved for several reasons.