Registering for your right to vote sounds odd to me. In my country, anyone with a legal address is automatically invited to vote. If you do not have one or are expat, you can register yourself.
Now, in my neighboring country, Belgium, there's even a voting duty. And while not enforced, Belgians are by law required to come to a voting boot. They can abstain from the voting itself if they want to.
In my country, anyone with a legal address is automatically invited to vote.
Did you register your legal address? If not how will someone know how many people assigned to a given address? The primary key in your database needs to be controlled somehow.
The reality is voter registration happens in most countries. In some countries it's explicate (like Australia where you register your name and address with the AEC or risk a fine if you don't), and in some countries it's more indirect such as a country neighbouring Belgium where you have to register your name against your address with
If not how will someone know how many people assigned to a given address?
In my country (Spain), the government is also sending invites (actually, the ballots themselves) to all the citizens and you don't need to perform any action to vote. If you move to a different address, you would have to communicate it such that your records are updated. But, other than for elections and a few other things, there is no problem if your actual address doesn't match the one in the official records, mainly if both of them are in the same city. All this seems closely related to the way in which
Yes exactly. The address situation is secondary to having a list of eligible voters and ensuring that the correct number of votes are sent/counted. Correct addresses only really help determine which local area you vote for, on a national election there is considerable tolerance to error in such measures.
But critical is a list of people who are eligible to vote, and if you can do that via something everyone has (Personal ID, BSN, or whatever) then that's good. The problem comes in countries like the USA or A
Ah! OK. I misunderstood your statement as a voter registration being an almost forced requirement everywhere. My bad. In any case and by bearing in mind my absolute ignorance about the actual details, I still don't see the need to register to vote every time regardless of the specific citizen ID conditions. You could register just once, even by default at your birth or after the first relevant action you do (e.g., opening a bank account or buying/renting a house), and change that information if required. Ev
I still don't see the need to register to vote every time
It's not. In Australia you only register once when you're 18 and register again if your address changes. I believe in the USA it's the same but the USA is weird so I'm sure there's difference even within the USA:-)
Even countries with no formal ID systems certainly have long-term records of all their citizens
If one thing is true of any country, that's the tax department can find you even without formal ID systems:-D.
Even though I am not particularly interested in any of this, I had a free while now and decided to do a quick research just to fill all the knowledge voids in the last posts. You are right and, by default, voter registration happens just once in Australia and also in most of jurisdictions (e.g., states within the US), unless there are relevant changes in the situation of the given person. You can find a reasonably good overview in wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
In general, the aforementioned point seems to be mostly unrelated to the way in which the information for population statistics/census is being collected (why?). Countries like the USA or Australia are regularly performing the kind of door-to-door, personal information collection which I was referring in my first post. The conditions vary a lot from country to country. There are also many other countries where nothing of this happens, not at a noticeable scale and since many years ago. Curiously, there was an EU census in 2011 and I didn't even know about it despite having been living in Spain at that time. There is again an interesting wiki page [wikipedia.org] listing all the actions at the country level (national census or blank). There, you can find links to pages explaining how the different EU countries deal with all this. According to Wikipedia, Spain is actually performing a national census once every 10 years, but as said no relevant actions at the citizen level are performed. I have never received or heard of any sort of visit, call, letter or advertisement generically asking citizens for active collaboration. Quite a few years ago, I got a communication from the national statistics department asking me to share some information about my professional activity, mainly because of having a technology-intensive business formally located in a rural, technology-deprived area. So, I was a good for stats, government outlier. It was completely voluntary and specific to my situation.
I am a very reasonable person who fully understands the innumerable (historical, social, whatever) peculiarities associated with such an essential part of a country. I can easily refrain my programming, data, logical/storage/structural or even common-sense (over-)optimisation urges and happily accept that some things can't be changed. Actually, I am completely sure that, in many situations, a theoretical-suboptimal approach can perform much better because of a myriad of uncontrollable aspects like, in this case, defining features of the given society. But I surely can throw some thoughts about what might be the main reasons for those differences as I did in my previous posts, mostly objective ideas rather than actual critics. Despite all that and by still fully accepting my ignorance about most of the relevant details (people talking abstractly and generically from a passive, far-away, safe position about something which they haven't truly experienced/lived/suffered and which, consequently, they don't really truly understand aren't exactly what I consider wise and sensible individuals whose opinions should be taken too seriously), I do think that all these unnecessarily-requiring-active-actions approaches could be appreciably improved, mainly nowadays and by bearing in mind the tremendous available computational power, on which these systems are already relying anyway.
Those little differences. (Score:3, Interesting)
Registering for your right to vote sounds odd to me. In my country, anyone with a legal address is automatically invited to vote. If you do not have one or are expat, you can register yourself.
Now, in my neighboring country, Belgium, there's even a voting duty. And while not enforced, Belgians are by law required to come to a voting boot. They can abstain from the voting itself if they want to.
Re: (Score:2)
In my country, anyone with a legal address is automatically invited to vote.
Did you register your legal address? If not how will someone know how many people assigned to a given address? The primary key in your database needs to be controlled somehow.
The reality is voter registration happens in most countries. In some countries it's explicate (like Australia where you register your name and address with the AEC or risk a fine if you don't), and in some countries it's more indirect such as a country neighbouring Belgium where you have to register your name against your address with
Re: (Score:2)
If not how will someone know how many people assigned to a given address?
In my country (Spain), the government is also sending invites (actually, the ballots themselves) to all the citizens and you don't need to perform any action to vote. If you move to a different address, you would have to communicate it such that your records are updated. But, other than for elections and a few other things, there is no problem if your actual address doesn't match the one in the official records, mainly if both of them are in the same city. All this seems closely related to the way in which
Re: (Score:2)
Yes exactly. The address situation is secondary to having a list of eligible voters and ensuring that the correct number of votes are sent/counted. Correct addresses only really help determine which local area you vote for, on a national election there is considerable tolerance to error in such measures.
But critical is a list of people who are eligible to vote, and if you can do that via something everyone has (Personal ID, BSN, or whatever) then that's good. The problem comes in countries like the USA or A
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I still don't see the need to register to vote every time
It's not. In Australia you only register once when you're 18 and register again if your address changes. I believe in the USA it's the same but the USA is weird so I'm sure there's difference even within the USA :-)
Even countries with no formal ID systems certainly have long-term records of all their citizens
If one thing is true of any country, that's the tax department can find you even without formal ID systems :-D.
Re:Those little differences. (Score:2)
Even though I am not particularly interested in any of this, I had a free while now and decided to do a quick research just to fill all the knowledge voids in the last posts. You are right and, by default, voter registration happens just once in Australia and also in most of jurisdictions (e.g., states within the US), unless there are relevant changes in the situation of the given person. You can find a reasonably good overview in wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
In general, the aforementioned point seems to be mostly unrelated to the way in which the information for population statistics/census is being collected (why?). Countries like the USA or Australia are regularly performing the kind of door-to-door, personal information collection which I was referring in my first post. The conditions vary a lot from country to country. There are also many other countries where nothing of this happens, not at a noticeable scale and since many years ago. Curiously, there was an EU census in 2011 and I didn't even know about it despite having been living in Spain at that time. There is again an interesting wiki page [wikipedia.org] listing all the actions at the country level (national census or blank). There, you can find links to pages explaining how the different EU countries deal with all this. According to Wikipedia, Spain is actually performing a national census once every 10 years, but as said no relevant actions at the citizen level are performed. I have never received or heard of any sort of visit, call, letter or advertisement generically asking citizens for active collaboration. Quite a few years ago, I got a communication from the national statistics department asking me to share some information about my professional activity, mainly because of having a technology-intensive business formally located in a rural, technology-deprived area. So, I was a good for stats, government outlier. It was completely voluntary and specific to my situation.
I am a very reasonable person who fully understands the innumerable (historical, social, whatever) peculiarities associated with such an essential part of a country. I can easily refrain my programming, data, logical/storage/structural or even common-sense (over-)optimisation urges and happily accept that some things can't be changed. Actually, I am completely sure that, in many situations, a theoretical-suboptimal approach can perform much better because of a myriad of uncontrollable aspects like, in this case, defining features of the given society. But I surely can throw some thoughts about what might be the main reasons for those differences as I did in my previous posts, mostly objective ideas rather than actual critics. Despite all that and by still fully accepting my ignorance about most of the relevant details (people talking abstractly and generically from a passive, far-away, safe position about something which they haven't truly experienced/lived/suffered and which, consequently, they don't really truly understand aren't exactly what I consider wise and sensible individuals whose opinions should be taken too seriously), I do think that all these unnecessarily-requiring-active-actions approaches could be appreciably improved, mainly nowadays and by bearing in mind the tremendous available computational power, on which these systems are already relying anyway.