If you live in Texas, make sure to register to vote! The deadline is coming up in a few days on the 7th. Note that for Texas you must register either in person or by mail, you cannot register online unlike most states
Find information on how to register to vote anywhere https://vote.gov/
I have never understood why you need to register ahead of time to vote in US. It seems like an unnecessary blocker. In Denmark you just show up on the day, state your SSN, show ID and get a ballot.
We don’t have national ID or election systems. So with early voting it would be legitimately possible to register and vote multiple times in multiple places without the deadline.
The SSN isn’t an identification. In fact, it specifically says on the back of mine that it is not to be used for identification.
It was intended intended to do one thing only: track lifetime earnings to determine retirement benefits. The thing is since there isn’t a national ID everyone is required to get, businesses started using it to track people.
You need to do it because it’s an unnecessary blocker. That’s the point. Poor people disproportionately struggle to jump through the hurdles in place for voting, and Poor people disproportionately vote D. R loves to make voting harder under the auspices of “fraud prevention”.
Also a lot of federal centralization didnt happen until the great depression, we are a federation of states meaning that historically it most shit was handled by the states and not in a states rights way but a who runs the local library sort of way. It was easier bureaucracatically as well allowing the feds to focus on other things.
This is also why random bits of bureaucracy is not standardized across all states, like the DMV sure most states got the memo but then you have whatever the fuck Washington is doing.
It really is also a states rights thing. The federal government, by design, has no say in how elections or driver’s licenses work.
That they have stepped in to the driver’s license space is an overstep of their authority, honestly.
The federal government is not the sovereign entity, the many states are.
Yes, it’s utterly stupid. One reason I can point to is that the US never really had a national ID system. The social security number is a hack to get something along the lines of an ID, but it’s not reliable enough to make it viable for elections.
That’s because a national ID requirement is illegal.
I can’t find the law because I now suck at searching and searching has gotten worse.
gives all the smaller governmental departments(like the municipal courts) time to assimilate your info for future contacts like jury duty
