<x-flowed>Dear All

In doing work on voter registration in the US -- part of the
big issue in the US is that we don't have a national register of
citizens.  We don't have even state or local registers of citizens.
We have separate registers -- registers for voting, registers for
driving, registers for people who want to travel abroad, social
security cards for working which is the closest to a national one,
local and state birth registers (but these are not conclusive for
certain ages).

This gives local authorities who control voter registration their
discretion since they control the registration list for electoral
participation.  There is this recent federal legislation to try to
make driver's licenses like a federal id by telling states they need
to check citizenship etc. but it is still a voluntary thing, i.e. if
states don't do it then the federal government says it may not accept
the state's driver's license as an id for federal government things
like boarding planes, etc., but otherwise the state is not penalized.

It seems that other countries vary in this dimension.  That
industrialized countries in europe have national registers of citizens
but I suspect that other countries with less organized governments may
not have these registers, but I don't know.  I understand that this
may be related to whether a country is common law or civil law, that
in common law countries people are not legal entities(?) but that in
civil law countries they are(?).  I also wonder whether
there are other countries where local authorities have significant
power over these issues.  I want to read about this, do you guys know
of something that would be particularly good at discussing the issues
of citizen registers and the decisions that governments made to have
these (or not)?

Becky


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