Last night on Fresh Air, Jonah Goldman of the National Campaign for Fair Elections offered a not-so-new, not-so-radical, duh-in-a-good-way idea about how reduce voter registration fraud: Universal registration for all citizens.
There is no reason why we have to leave it to these community groups to do a lot of the great work that they do in registering voters. This should be the responsibility of the government to register voters and it’s not that hard to do it; it’s not that expensive to do it; it’s a lot more efficient to do it.
Transferring the responsibility from the voter to the government, similar to Selective Service registration, Goldman says, would relieve pressure on local election officials and prevent the type of fraud allegations that are in the news news these days.
Katia Bachko is on staff at The New Yorker.