I hope they do this. It sounds like a good idea. Several times I have heard people say they don't register to vote because they might be summoned for jury duty. Probably they wouldn't be very good voters anyway.

This would save time, probably expense, and energy trying to get people registered.

I really think details of the voting process should not be left up to the states. It should be uniform nationally and as corruption proof as we can make it.

I would imagine that ACORN would be very happy to be put out of the business of voter registration by making it completely unnecessary.

I cann't believe people on a progressive seem to be leaning toward "taking" ACORN out of the equaion. If the govt. can implement a system that actually registers the very poor, young and least educated, then ACORN wouldn't have to and they might even be glad not to. But I fear the emphasis may be on taking out groups that do drives and not fixing registration for those people that they alone seem to excell at registering. In other words, somebody still needs to be able to conduct large well funded voter registration drives for the poor, disbaled, etc.

Message to bloggers: keep your eye on the registration of these difficult to register populations, not on "taking ACORN out" or else we will get the same shoddy reform we got with HAVA.

I think a major problem for both state and national offices is the fact that the elections are conducted by local officials. Where I live, one must be a resident of a precinct to vote in any election. Many younger and less affluent voters change their residences often and then fail to update their voting registration with their new address. They may still be a state resident and still be a U.S. citizen, but since they cannot lawfully vote in a precinct they do not reside in, they lose the right to vote for state and national offices. Maybe we need two separate ballots -- a voter gets a state and a federal ballot if they have a state drivers license, but they get a local ballot only if the license has an address in that precinct.

What a lousy article.

"nearly 1 in 4 American adults is not on the rolls"

That is a choice they make (or they are not eligible to vote). Mandatory registration would not improve things. Failure to re-register after a move is a legit concern, as is being multiply registered. Making it easy to re-register or change address is good. Digging up delinquents so as to pad the registration rolls is bad.

"national voter registration database"

Double ick.

"registration in the hands of the states"

Already is. Allowing states to compare registration databases to reduce duplicates? That's a maybe, full of the very problems of typos etc. much discussed this year.

"One benefit of universal registration is that it would take groups like ACORN...out of the voter registration equation."

Wrong thinking. Groups like ACORN help bring people into the political process. And we ALL know that 99% of the bad press on ACORN was fabricated. Registration is only a means, not an end in itself.

"And that would prevent the GOP from using ACORN as a boogeyman for fears of systematic voter fraud"

The GOP will just find other ghosts.

As long as national elections are on the same ballot as local elections, a national registration is irrelevant at best.

I wouldn't trust a national system. It would be too big a temptation for the party in power to corrupt it. I'd far rather trust my vote to the little old ladies at the local middle school than to a federal bureacracy that would likely be too inefficient to be accurate and timely. We have same day registration in MN and I can't see how a federal system could improve that, though we could have used 207 more Minnesotans registering to vote for Franken.

I ran a voter location that processed a little over 300 voters last Tuesday, and there were about 30 more voters who came in to vote thinking that they were (sometimes just maybe) registered to vote only to find that they were not.

Some had moved. Some had put a hold on their mail while out of town, received a letter from the voting registrar during that time that was returned, and came in to vote and found their registration has been canceled. Some just hadn't voted since the 2004 Presidential election and found their vote had been purged.

I did about 16 provisional ballots, and the rest simply didn't bother to try to vote. A provisional ballot takes about 20 extra minutes to process, not counting the phone calls to confirm no registration which run another 10 to 20 minutes. A lot of people seem to interpret being told they have to vote a provisional ballot as saying their vote won't count.

I did notice that most of the non-registered voters were young and/or minority or just working class. I think it is fair to guess that they were induced to vote by the long running Democratic primaries or by Obama's ground game GOTV operation. What we didn't have was a rather thorough voter registration process.

I'd really like to see same-day registration. A lot of people get left out when they have to register 30 days before the election and they are not people who follow elections as a hobby as most of us here do. That should not be disqualifying.

Of course, with No Child Left Behind objective tests, the schools have stopped teaching civics and teach the NCLB tests instead. Civics isn't on them. The media here said damned little about the voter's registration deadline. Too busy reporting car wrecks, truck wrecks, sensational murders, especially of children and highly photogenic fires on TV (which for some reason the radio doesn't report on unless it messes up traffic.)

I forgot to say, I also miss the fun of going to the polls. It was satisfying to hear them say "you have voted!" I wouldn't have liked hours in line though.