Donald Trump is attempting to select his own citizenry and control who can vote by gathering the personal details of all Americans, Arizona’s top election official has warned.
Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, fears that the Trump administration’s active efforts to forcibly extract voter files from 30 states including Fontes’s own are part of a bigger plan to gather vital information on all US citizens into a centralised database. “Trump is trying to amass a master list that will allow him to declare someone an enemy of the state,” he said.
The vote itself is anonymous, the registration that your are eligible to vote is not. I’m sure that most countries, including Canada, has a form of validating database or other system to keep track of who is actually eligible to vote.
In the US, a lot of this registration data contains a lot more than a simple Boolean if a person is eligible to vote, it also contains PII and more importantly, political registration. Like in AZ, you are forced to declare a political party in order to vote in the primary. That kind of information in the hands of a party that endorses limiting voting based on political leaning is a very dangerous thing.