[Trump Shooting] Suspect was registered as Republican voter, state records show

Can’t have homeless people or people with limited means actually voting. A republican would never win again.

For primaries, parties may close their primaries to only registered members of the party to vote in

republicans need barriers for people of color, poor people and young people traditionally to avoid full participation in democracy. In this modern time, some states actually still require you to print paper applications and mail them to your Secretary of State's office at the post office with a physical stamp to register to vote... The list of individual barriers to completion within those seemingly small actions can not be overstated, especially to young people who on average don't own home printers and may have literally never bought a stamp or mailed a physical letter.

Any time you apply for a driver's license or whatever, you are asked if you want to register with a party. That is the party that you will vote for in the primary elections. Some (many?) states offer same day registration which, in my opinion, is how it should be. It puts you in a database in case voter fraud ACTUALLY happens (insanely rare) where they can check to make sure Ur Quell only voted once and investigate what happened if they see multiple votes.

As for the primaries: This is how the US handles our version of Ranked Choice and... I kind of prefer it (with some major caveats). The general idea is that all right wing politicians should run for the republican seat and all sane people for the Democrat seat. You campaign at the tail end of the previous year and the party members vote on you in the spring. There is definitely some sketchiness with super delegates (although, that is not overly dissimilar from how many parliament systems pick a Prime Minister), but this creates a unified front come November.

Yes, two party systems are bad, but that is what things tend to converge on when push comes to shove. Just look at France where the Left more or less unified to stand a chance against fascism.

Like almost every aspect of the US government: it is a fundamentally good system that needs to be iterated on and better taught to the populace. It is just that republicans know that education hurts them and want to take advantage of all the loopholes that Tommy Jefferson obviously intentionally wrote while he was raping his plantation full of slaves.

You can register as Unaffiliated fwiw, you don't have to choose Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or Independant. It's mainly a choice of which primary to vote in anyway.

Only have to register your party affiliation for the primaries, and most states (but not Pennsylvania) allow you to vote in these as "independent". The primaries are only used to gauge early public interest in candidates to help determine the party's nominee for the final election.

Its for the parties themselves.

But to answer your question, theres intentionally no list of citizens. The only way to verify that they can vote is registration, unless you want a passport or birth cert or whatever