In my opinion, voter registration is a reasonable regulation to protect everything I mentioned above, as long as it does not intimidate, discriminate, inconvenience, or harass citizens.
Historically, this is exactly what voter registration has been used for. You put it somewhere perpetually underfunded (especially in urban areas) like the DMV, and watch the results come in.
I don't disagree with the principle, but the current state of affairs makes it impossible to trust that voter registration laws are passed in good faith.
That's clearly not true, when the votes of California residents are worth significantly fewer electoral votes per capita than in any other state. Until the electoral college is replaced with a straight popular vote, we will never have the right to equally-weighted votes.
Correct.
The US Govt and many others already maintain a complete list of all persons, living and dead, including useful attributes like citizenship, current address, age (aka eligibility to vote), in real-time.
Maintaining separate, duplicate, opt-in, haphazardly maintained, patchwork voter registration databases is wasteful, error-prone, and only serves the purpose of disenfranchising undesirables.
Why should Federal government care who lives in Florida, aside from a population estimate for the Electoral College? That's Florida's business.
Maybe. Maybe voter rolls should be some sort of bio-token that proofs your uniqueness and existence, and your approximate location (to determine local eligibility) but uses a pseudonym and is not connected to anything like your taxes, drivers license, etc.
Things like aid and whatnot should really be isolated and broken off to prevent mass collection dbs.
You would think it's that easy as the "government knows all". But from working on government databases and systems, it's hardly the case. Disparate systems, competing departments, endless workshops that hold up progress, political spats, etc. And this isn't even in a country like the US that has separate states!
The data is misused in just about every way. From colleges using it as a student id number to people committing crimes with it.
https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10096.pdf
USCIS lists as common proofs of citizenship: US birth certificate, US passport, certificate of citizenship, or naturalization certificate.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/A4...
https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/acceptable-documents
(an unrestricted SSN is proof of eligibility to work in the US)
Sometimes it's better to be paid than right. (Especially on your first few jobs)
The other is a largely inconsequential part of your personal identity, which has routinely been used as justification for persecution throughout human history.
(Personally: I support responsible gun ownership, but I don't think there's anything wrong with asking owners to register their serial numbers.)
> asking owners to register their serial numbers > deadly weapon, bearing a serial number that might be especially useful if found at a crime scene
The second amendment gives you a right to own a firearm. Nowhere does it say you should be allowed to use it to commit criminal acts with impunity.
I view it like the requirement to have a license plate visible on my car, which seems reasonable given the risks involved in driving.
Citation Needed
Should we not require drivers licenses or car registration?
Everyone has a culture, even if from your perspective it's normal or even "low".
Libertarians, on the other hand, recognize that all of the amendments are vital and represented a huge step forward for not only the US, but all of mankind. Now, if only we would abide by them at the present time...
Most reports put between 80%-94% of crimes involving a gun as being committed with an illegally obtained weapon. Which means of the 300k firearm related crimes in 2013 perhaps less than 20k were due to legal gun ownership.
I'm not bringing all this up because I actually believe Muslims are more dangerous than guns, or that Trump was right, or anything along those lines. I'm just trying to highlight how your bias might be more unfounded than you'd imagine.