Pew Research Center, 11/1/2022
Voting is not enshrined as a right.
In many countries, the national government takes the lead in getting people’s names on the voter rolls – whether by registering them automatically once they become eligible (as in, for example, Sweden or Japan) or by aggressively encouraging them to do so (as in the United Kingdom). In such countries, there’s often little difference in turnout rates among registered voters and the voting-age population as a whole.
Responsibilities for voter registration is parceled out willy-nilly with little to no effective oversight.
In other countries – notably the United States – it’s largely up to individual voters to register themselves. And the U.S. is unusual in that voter registration is not the job of a single national agency, but of individual states, counties and cities. That means the rules can vary considerably depending on where a would-be voter lives.
A do-it-yourself approach is the primary path to voter registration.
In the U.S., there’s a huge gap between voting-age turnout (62.8% in 2020) and registered-voter turnout (94.1% that same year). In essence, registered voters in the U.S. are much more of a self-selected group than in other countries – already more likely to vote because, in most cases, they took the trouble to register themselves.
Just think how many more people in the U.S. would vote if the barriers were removed.
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