Oregon legislature passes automatic voter registration

[Tender Branson]

About time.

Hopefully more states do the same, so that finally the 30-40 million unregistered eligible Americans are registered to vote.

[Tender Branson]

The thing is that people who don't vote probably shouldn't vote

In a democracy, you don't get to decide who should or should not vote.

That's not what im saying, what im saying is that people who can but choose not to register to vote are almost always the most uninformed in society and we should not feel the need to encourage them to alter our government if they already have made it clear that they don't care

This proposal just makes voting there and ready to those who didn't register before. Most of the people who don't care still won't vote. Its not like its mandatory voting.

The benefit of well-realised automatic voter registration is that it allows all people to vote in the election, unlike the personal voter registration system:

* Under AVR, people who decide to vote only in the final days because of a late game-changing event will be allowed to vote as well.

* Under PVR, there's a cutoff date (often a month or so ahead of the election) and late-deciders are not allowed to vote. Unless there's election day registration ...

As you can see, AVR is vastly superior and that's why it is used in all major developed countries.

[Tender Branson]

Gass:

Oregon's new law is a 1st step in the right direction, but still far away from European style automatic voter registration systems, which basically really register 99.99% of all eligible people to vote.

The Oregon law is only based on driver license records, but not every person in the US has a driver license. Which further means there are still thousands of people left unregistered, for example the poor or disabled.

[Tender Branson]

Oregon's new law is a 1st step in the right direction, but still far away from European style automatic voter registration systems, which basically really register 99.99% of all eligible people to vote.

Even in Europe, I think there's some variation between country. In France, estimates hold that nearly 10% of the eligible population remains unregistered.

Are you sure ?

10% seems pretty high for France.

Do you have any links ?