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.
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.
Ask not what your country can do for you, demand that that you country do it for you.
Actually, that's already what the law requires. All DMV offices and state social services offices are supposed to provide voter registration assistance under federal law. A lot of states just don't do it. In 1995, Obama was one of a group of lawyers that represented ACORN in a lawsuit against Illinois for failing to provide said assistance at the DMV. ACORN won.
Do what we do here in Canada - put a check box on your Income Tax forms that states do you want to be registered to vote - it automatically registers you to vote in Federal and Provincial elections. This completely does away with the problem of mismatches on data entry between voter reg cards and state/federal databases.
Another thing you should do away with is having to register as Democratic, Republican or Independent as your current system makes that information available to political parties thereby creating the opportunity for massive voter fraud such as the GOP is doing with caging and sending out fake state government notices to registered Democrats in swing states telling them that the state has changed the voting day for Democrats to ease congestion at the polls. The only voting fraud going on in your country is that which the GOP are actively engaged in.