Tuesday, Anna North on Jezebel did a post on why she wouldn’t be voting:
… I can’t vote today, because I didn’t register in time. New York State’s voter registration forms had to be postmarked or filled out in person by October 8, and I missed that deadline. Obviously, this was really stupid of me… I’m definitely at fault here, and I feel pretty bad.
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However! Requiring voter registration nearly a month before an election is also bad for democracy. Nine states — including Iowa, where I lived and voted before I moved to New York — allow election-day voter registration in some form or another, and those states have significantly higher voter turnout. According to a study by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, “residents of states with 30-day closing deadlines were anywhere from 3 to 9 percent less likely to turnout than residents of states with election day voter registration.” Public policy research group Demos.org reports an even greater effect, “States with EDR have historically boasted turnout rates 10 to 12 percentage points higher than states that do not offer Election Day Registration.” The Caltech/MIT researchers say registration deadlines have a greater effect on turnout than any other voting-practices policy, be it polling place hours or absentee ballot regulations.
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Also, requiring early registration disproportionately affects certain social groups. According to the Caltech/MIT study, “the impact of the registration closing deadline was greater for voters with lower levels of educational attainment, and those who were generally less able to navigate the voter registration process in their state.” …
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Young people aren’t the only ones who move a lot — so do low-income Americans. According to Demos, “Census data show that over 35 million people in America moved between 2007 and 2008. Approximately 45 percent of those moving during this period had incomes of less than $25,000.” By requiring early registration, New York and thirty-nine other states (North Dakota doesn’t require registration at all), are disadvantaging would-be voters who are young, who are poor, who move a lot, or who have trouble registering due to lack of information, lack of Internet access, limited English proficiency, working long hours, disability, or a host of other reasons. Since a lot of these voters are already disadvantaged anyway, early voter registration deadlines actually perpetuate social inequality by denying underprivileged groups a voice in the electoral process…
To be honest, I only got to vote yesterday because I took a cab to the registry office 15 minutes before the (extended) evening deadline on the final day for eligibility (October 6, in Massachusetts). Our town dumps you from the voting roles if you don’t mail back its biennial census form, and we do so much of our paperwork online these days that the form got lost. But I had the spare time & cash to show up on their doorstep with multiple forms of ID… and the incentive that I am really, really starting to hate the over-55 voting demographic, of which I will become a member next week.
It’s well worth reading the comments over at the link — there are all sorts of interesting discussions on why people don’t or can’t vote. Historically, the Real American(tm) tradition is that, despite our pious talk, voting regulation is not about ensuring that every citizen votes, but that only the right (Right) people be permitted the “privilege” of exercising the franchise.
James K. Polk, Esq.
Absentee Ballot.
Problem solved.
Kryptik
I can sympathize with this, really. As much as it shames me, my first vote came in 2006. I was only just too young to vote in 2000, missed deadline in 2002, and had weird moving issues in 2004 that lead to my registration not being properly processed until AFTER the election.
So…yeah, there’s that.
Warren Terra
In case there’s no reminder next week: Happy (slightly early) Birthday!
Yutsano
@Kryptik: This is exactly why I decided not to change my registration until after the election. You can do it online in WA (and I really want to vote for Inslee in two years) but it would have nullified the ballot I already had mailed to me. So I let it alone for now.
JGabriel
@Yutsano:
You do realize that the Rossi campaign just activated three GOP lawyers to subpoena the phone company for your records based on your IP address so they can nullify your vote, right?
.
Yutsano
@JGabriel: Snicker. Bring it on. I happen to work with a lawyer who’s also a tax agent. I highly recommend NOT fucking with her.
Andrew M
Long time reader, first time poster. As a Canadian, I view your electoral system with equal parts of admiration and horror. The whole register to vote thing is a prime example. Up here we don’t really have to do a registration. On the federal level, it gets updated through the census every 5 years. As well, there appears to be significant sharing of information among the various levels of government. We voted in municipal elections last week, and my wife and I got voter cards in the mail. We just took them along with ID to the polling place. We had just moved last year, so I believe they took our info from the property tax rolls.
AB
just to be completely lazy about this, could we just uh, register or vote online or something?
JGabriel
@AB: You do NOT want online voting. Way too easy to hack.
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Calouste
I never understood that you have to register separately to vote. In first world countries, you send your address change to the government and they automatically send you your voter information at your new address (they also notify the taxman about your new address at the same time).
JGabriel
@Yutsano: COOL! Vote Fight!
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Martin
@James K. Polk, Esq.: How does that help you if you aren’t registered, which, uh, was the point of both stories.
North Dakota doesn’t require registration. Show up with proof of residence and you can vote. Registration is just another voter suppression tactic. Your drivers license is good enough for almost every state activity, except voting. Hell, even a water bill can get you remarkably far.
Viva BrisVegas
Which will always be the case unless voting is made not just a right, but a requirement.
It is much more difficult to disenfranchise someone when they have to show reason why they didn’t vote. A fringe benefit is that it drives libertarians nuts.
Do you want to have a guess which country has compulsory voting and which country has a voter participation rate of 90-95%?
A: Australia and Australia.
Surprisingly enough it is not a civil liberties deprived hell hole as a result.
wengler
There are two things that will get you weird faces from foreigners from OECD countries.
1) paying for healthcare individually
2) registering to vote
and of course if you’re younger
3) drinking age at 21
Martin
@Viva BrisVegas:
Well, I don’t know – they did unleash the weapon of mass destruction known as Rupert Murdoch on us.
Calouste
@wengler:
4) Being allowed to drive a car at 15 or 16.
5) People carrying guns in public when not out hunting.
Warren Terra
@Martin:
Well, Rupert Murdoch is now an American citizen. I suppose any country can grow a Rupert Murdoch – but clearly it’s the clever one that manages to export its Rupert Murdoch!
(Although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Murdoch, despite now being officially American, still controls a lot of the media sources of our antipodean brethren).
Lev
Just curious: do any other countries actually have something like a midterm election? Seems like none do. I mean, you’re almost guaranteed to have lousy turnout half the time. It works out well for Republicans I guess.
See, I’d love to see congressional terms extended to four years and senate terms extended to eight. Perhaps it would marginally cut down on corruption too?
JGabriel
Martin:
I knew it! Murdoch is a secret Australian Op to destroy America.
Everything is so much clearer now.
Damn Aussies. Before you know it, we’ll all be speaking Australian and drinking Victoria Bitter.
.
Yutsano
@JGabriel:
Fixteth. At least the Aussies would consider that much more hellacious.
Suffern ACE
@Lev: I would like to know how many countries have as many elections as we do. Every six months it seems that there is a primary or election in New York. I don’t want to grouse about it, but do other countries have so many offices that need filling at the city through national level?
Suck It Up!
Wow! Didn’t know a lot of that. Has legislation ever been brought up to address this or any groups who’ve made this their “pet project”?
Suck It Up!
@Viva BrisVegas:
hey, its bad enough that we’re turning into France.
Just Some Fuckhead
I barely got to the polls before they closed. Woulda voted on the way to work but truck had a flat tire. Recovering from surgery last week so I couldn’t change the tire myself. Had to call Mrs. Fuckhead for a ride, got to work an hour or more late, then we had to coordinate our end times to ride together home but not before fetching the Fuckhids from their various afterschool programs..
And then when I got there to vote I remembered I’d forgotten to actually figure out who all the local candidates for council and school board were so I’d know who not to vote for. Mrs. Fuckhead did the exact same thing and as we compared notes, we figured out we essentially cancelled each other out on everything except Nye.
JGabriel
@Yutsano: I’ll assume you know best. I originally wrote the line as Foster’s, then looked it up, assuming my American perception might be a little provincial, and discovered that, actually, VB is the best selling beer in Australia. So I went with that instead.
Yeah, I tend to overthink my jokes sometimes.
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Viva BrisVegas
@Warren Terra:
I think he has his claws into about 70% of the local print media.
His rags went within an ace of bringing down the current Labor government, so it must be a good investment for him.
TKOEd
So…the folks at Reason tackled this issue in a whole different way:
http://reason.com/blog/2010/11/03/why-not-voting-doesnt-mean-giv
By all means Libertarians, DONT VOTE AGAIN. PLEASE!.
Viva BrisVegas
@Yutsano:
Except that the younger generation would probably ask: What’s Foster’s?
mark
Canadian here. After 12 years in the us, elections remain ridiculous to me. In canada, you vote for the house (to put it in us terms) and probably the mayor, maybe a city councilor or two and the school board. That’s it – a handful of Xs in five years. Referendums 2-3 times per lifetime. And of course you can show up at the polls with a piece of mail on election day and you get to vote.
annp23
I have no sympathy for this shit. Voting is really fucking important. People not taking it seriously is really bad for democracy.
If you have time to BLOG about how you don’t have time to register, there’s something seriously wrong with your priorities.
Carol
You forget @annp23: People do take it seriously. Its just that so much of the mechanism for doing so was created back in the “Farmer John” days when nobody worked shifts or commuted. Back then, if you worked, you worked as a farmhand, and the farmer you worked for gave you the day off to vote for the folks he told you to vote for. As long as the cows were fed and milked, there was no problem. Harvest was over, and the weather was too cold for too much else. The rest of the town were sole proprietors who could simply close shop for the day. And of course women couldn’t vote, so there were no issues with childcare or picking kids from school. You had to be 21, so no trying to make it to class and voting at the same time. So voting was easier.
So the real discussion should be how do we craft a mechanism for voting that takes into account 21st century realities of work, school, childcare, and mobility?What would be more constructive than e than the criticism would be just what a modern voting system would look like, and how it would improve turnout, accuracy and accountability.
Things I like:
Mail Voting
Weekend voting (for the in-person part of voting)
Automatic voter registration when you get your drivers license or state id
Local voting at 16
Paper trail mandatory-even if computers get used, I want a paper tape at least
Veterans Day Voting Holiday
Open source election counting software (No Diebold mystery code or corporately owned machines)
Nick the Australian
I’m also Australian.
I have a question about the registration thing: do Americans have to register for *every* election or something? Because from what I’ve read it seems like it’s a *lot* more problematic over there than here.
And yeah, nobody drinks Fosters. I mean NOBODY. I’m not sure if they even sell it here any more. People drink VB or Carlton Draught (which are owned by the same company as Fosters, oddly enough.)
Nick the Australian
Plus, of course, people drink Tooheys, James Boag, Pure Blonde, Hahn, etc. Some people drink XXXX. Just so you don’t think I’m shilling for CUB or something.
Anyway, registration — to not be registered is pretty damn uncommon. One friend of mine missed out and we were all going on about how he was an idiot. (Mainly because he’d have to pay a fine, that is.)
Note that compulsory voting only means you have to show up, not actually vote properly. Our election this year had a record number of “informal votes”.
JMC in the ATL
@Nick the Australian: No, once you are registered, you stay registered, in general. If you move to a new voting district (municipality in some states, county in others), you have to reregister.
There are nitpicky things like, depending on the state, people who have been in jail can’t vote. And in some places, voter roles get purged periodically if you don’t return census documents. Basically, it can be a pain in the ass to stay registered depending on your lifestyle.
Chris
You do realize that the Rossi campaign just activated three GOP lawyers to subpoena the phone company for your records based on your IP address so they can nullify your vote, right?
So, what about absentee voters? For example, people who had to take a trip out of state? People who temporarily had to move because of their job but still maintain residence in their original state? Soldiers, diplomats, journalists, truck drivers, and other breeds of travelers?
By the way, DC also has voter registration – did it at the polls, takes like five minutes. Every state should have something like that. Election day should also be a federal holiday, but you know, then too many of Those People might vote…
TomG
The primary reason why I vote at all, is because in New York you need at least 50,000 votes for a party to remain on the ballot automatically. THEREFORE, I tend to vote Libertarian in an effort to do some good by my vote. Not all Libertarian candidates are “Republicans in disguise”, either.
NY also allows you to register as a specific third party (instead of “Independent”) – but for some reason it was not widely publicized when the Greens and Libertarians won that right in court.
Jeff
@TomG: Which is why when I vote for my Democratic candidates in NY, I vote on the Working Families Line as much as possible, to elevate their presence in NY.
Danny
I had similar issues this year. I moved a few months before the election, and got my address change form in the mail a few days before the deadline. Unfortunately, my change wasn’t processed and I had to spend almost an hour on the phone over three separate calls trying to get my address changed so I could vote in the right precinct. Honestly, if I wasn’t so determined to vote I may not have noticed they never changed my address, and I might not have been able to vote.
This is ridiculous. Everyone should be mailed a ballot, and they should be handed out at corner stores. As long as you put some form of ID number (DL number, SS number, whatever) there should be no issues with making voting incredibly easy. As an added bonus you would have a clear paper trail to show who voted.
gelfling545
My son-in-law didn’t get to vote either (also NY) because he didn’t get home from the base where he was awaiting (disability) discharge from the army until Oct. 20 and his previous registration was in FL. He didn’t get to vote last year either, while he was still in Afghanistan, because the absentee ballots sent by turned out to be for the wrong election. We are more than a little annoyed by this and are writing to Shumer, Gillibrand & Louise Slaughter about it. It seems like 2 weeks ought to be enough time to process a registration.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Calouste:
Bleh, maybe its cause I grew up in the mythical 1990s, but what’s wrong with people getting driver’s licenses at a normal age? I hate how young people are simultaneously given some rights of adults (long term prison sentences, being able to join the military, etc) while some aspects of adolescence are ridiculously drug out (DLs, alcohol).
I think getting people to drive at the earliest age possible is a no brainer. But then, I got my DL at age 16 in 1995 in small town Oregon, so I may not be quite representative.
kideni
I heartily agree that we need to do more to make voting easier. In Wisconsin, it’s wonderfully easy to register to vote. You can register at the polls, or ahead of time at fire stations, at libraries, at the DMV, and at dog knows how many other locations. For proof of address, a utility bill or other mail showing you get mail there is enough. Voting itself is also easy with early voting arranged for much of the month of October, although mail-in balloting like in Oregon would be even better.
When I lived in Illinois, back before motor-voter laws, registering was a pain — you had to go to a government office (the county clerk, I think) in person, which meant you had to go during business hours. (Illinois long resisted motor-voter laws when under Republican governors — anything to keep turnout down. It worked.) It was a little easier once you could register when you renewed your driver’s license, but it still involved having to get it done during work hours. There were registration drives with groups like the League of Women Voters signing people up, but those only happened before a big election. The process in Pennsylvania was reasonably straightforward, and Nebraska was easy, though not as easy as Wisconsin.
thalarctos
@Viva BrisVegas: Foster’s–Australian for “piss”.
d. john
I hate the over 55 voting demographic too…
so much so, that I got banned from C&L (a badge I wear with honor) for p1551ng in the boomers wheaties
you are not alone.
d. john
@Chris:
Rossi can engage in all the vote caging he wants. He’ll never win here in Washington – and he seems to be the only prominent Republican at the state level… The goopers here haven’t yet figured out that the man is entirely unelectable. His tea party primary challenger wouldn’t even endorse him after he lost the primary. Said he was a liberal, or some such..
d. john
@mark:
I never thought I’d see such an elected official in Canada:
http://www.bobcesca.com/blog-archives/2010/11/worst_person_in_15.html
AFAIAC Canadians are no longer allowed to complain about the right wing morons we elect here in the US
dave
I’m with you! And right behind you on joining the old fogy demographic but, I’m going to look at this as doing my tiny little part of turning that demographic blue!
dww44
@Andrew M:
I’m really interested in the whole picture of Canadian elections for a couple of reasons, one of which is to attach the word Canadian to an example of how to run things better than we do to my Republican brother. He goes nuts.
The other is that I want to be part of an effort to reform
our system, so I’d like it if you could provide any links that would aid in my education.
dww44
@JMC in the ATL:
Well, I live in the same state as you, and our rolls get purged periodically for not voting. Sadly we vote on Diebold machines and when I recently asked the polling lady if there was a paper trail, she honestly didn’t have the first idea of what I was talking about.
Also, one of the well-known Atlanta TV stations ran a piece before the elections about purported voter fraud, aimed at a specific ethnic minority, and inteviewed some conservative expert, who said, in effect, “It’s bad if even one person votes who isn’t eligible”. The person who wasn’t registered to vote was an elderly Black woman.
Sorry, but in this state even more controlled by Republicans since Tuesday, they will never give up looking for reasons to keep the powerless from voting. That’s another reason I genuinely do hate Republicans.
Luthe
New Jersey may be deeply annoying in some ways, but instant voter registration when you get or renew your driver’s license is nice. Still doesn’t help those who don’t drive, but does reach a lot more people than regular voter registration would. Also, if you ask them for a change of address, they send you a new registration form along with the stickers for your license.
@Lev:
Are you kidding me? It’s bad enough Joe Lieberman is in the Senate for another two years. You want him to be there for another *four*?
trollhattan
@JMC in the ATL:
Right, moving triggers the need to re-register. I’ll add we have no national law per se beyond the Voting Rights Act, so the details differ state by state.
The
Confederacysouth would pretty much prefer a poll tax and seven forms of I.D. (including at least one AmEx Platinum card) to vote. I’m looking for a House repeal of the oppressive VRA following the killing of Obamacare(tm).p.s. California is up to something like 55% absentee ballots now. It’s sooo much simpler.
OldEditor
@Carol: Nope, annp has it right. Voting is crucial to successful democratic governance. Registration is easy even in the most backward, anti-voter states. All it takes is a sense of responsibility toward a system in which you have had the great good fortune to be born. You are also a member of a community of like-minded fellows. If you don’t vote, you let them down. If none in your community votes, quit taking up bandwidth, because you have contributed nothing. Leave it to those of us who actually care about current affairs and are trying to keep the flying monkeys from taking us – and you, I might add – into an economic and political wasteland.
KSinMA
@Viva BrisVegas: Brazil has compulsory voting too (per the NY Times in their story about Brazil’s recent presidential election).
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@OldEditor: Careful getting off your high horse. I’d be ever so sad if you broke a leg jumping off.