Tomorrow is the Deadline....
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In many U.S. states to register to vote. If you're a U.S. citizen, remember to exercise this right in order to protect other ones! Even if you also want to just burn this motherfucker to the ground right now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/us/politics/state-voter-registration-deadlines.html
https://whatiswrongwith.me/Mia
There were never any good old days. They are today. They are tomorrow. It's a stupid thing we say, cursing tomorrow with sorrow. -- Gogol Bordello -
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The fact you have to register to do something that is your full right has me so entirely baffled. Why is it like that? (Honest question, no sarcasm here.)
Isn't citizenship good enough?
Every four year over here, every eligible voter gets sent a voting card. No charge, no registering - we're already registered to be citizens. Then we go vote, bringing our voting card and ID, they compare it to the 'voting ledgers' and notes down that this person voted and which instances they voted for (and then of course there's several checks along the way before the final results are in.)
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@goblin said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
The fact you have to register to do something that is your full right has me so entirely baffled. Why is it like that? (Honest question, no sarcasm here.)
It makes it easier to disenfranchise voters.
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Mostly American elections are about disenfranchising people, either by laws, funding (not funding polling places in poor/urban/college areas and not funding vote by mail), or propaganda ("It doesn't matter if you vote or not, it never makes a difference).
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@goblin said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
The fact you have to register to do something that is your full right has me so entirely baffled. Why is it like that? (Honest question, no sarcasm here.)
In my state, you remain registered if you vote regularly. You are only "un-registered" if you don't vote for a certain period of time.
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@goblin said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
Every four year over here, every eligible voter gets sent a voting card.
From a practical standpoint, there is no central roster in the US of "eligible voters", especially considering that felons lose their right to vote for some period of time.
Without voter registration, the government would have to create such a roster. Otherwise you don't know who to send voter cards to.So why don't they just do that and simplify the process? Apart from the general inefficiency of the US gov't and the distaste for a national ID system -- as @Roz says, many believe it's a way to disenfranchise people under the guise of preventing voter fraud.
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Also putting in a plug--If you are able to donate the time for the actual work plus any training, please please PLEASE consider becoming an elections observer. I have now been a certified elections observer for 2 years in my county, and it is both uplifting personally and very very important. If you cannot do that (usually it's done via the local parties) then please consider getting involved with a group that provides transportation to polling centers (if your community still has those), or who is doing help outside a polling place.
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@mietze said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
Also putting in a plug--If you are able to donate the time for the actual work plus any training, please please PLEASE consider becoming an elections observer. I have now been a certified elections observer for 2 years in my county, and it is both uplifting personally and very very important. If you cannot do that (usually it's done via the local parties) then please consider getting involved with a group that provides transportation to polling centers (if your community still has those), or who is doing help outside a polling place.
Or become a member of your local preferred party's central committee.
Or, you know, just do something, anything.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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Alright, thanks for the answers all
I guess it's a bit harder to take care of that many... we're only 10 million in the entire country here, and that's ALL people, not just those who can vote.
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@ganymede I know. But I think becoming an elections observer is usually a lot more fun than becoming a member of the DCC (or RCC) at any level. Having been an official at the precinct and county level.
It's a huge time commitment, and if it involves travel it's not an insignificant amount of financial sacrifice too. We've been working to lessen that burden so that more people than silver haired white guys and rich people can make up those bodies. It's been a long slog, and we've been prioritizing purging the rapists/predators from our ranks first, pretty successfully, so that those meetings are actually safe ones for women to be at. -
@goblin Yeah, scale matters too. The electoral area I'm an elections observer for (King County, Washington State in the US, it includes Seattle and much but not all of the Seattle burbs) has 1.2 million registered voters. If everyone registered that was eligible it'd be likely double that or more.
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@goblin said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
The fact you have to register to do something that is your full right has me so entirely baffled. Why is it like that? (Honest question, no sarcasm here.)
Isn't citizenship good enough?
Every four year over here, every eligible voter gets sent a voting card. No charge, no registering - we're already registered to be citizens. Then we go vote, bringing our voting card and ID, they compare it to the 'voting ledgers' and notes down that this person voted and which instances they voted for (and then of course there's several checks along the way before the final results are in.)
The designers for American governance were very shaped by federalism, and wanted to place a great deal of authority in the hands of our individual states, meaning that control is at a local level, so we have county boards and state boards of elections, and only broad federal government oversight. You can imagine how wildly inefficient and confusing this is with a lot of different layers of government that in theory work seamlessly together but in practice have no idea what they are doing and create an kafkaesque nightmare.
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Honestly, trying to set up automatic voter registration in a country of some... 300 million or so people sounds like a logistical nightmare and we're already crazy in debt. Add to that government inefficiency and their penchant for overspending on anything they do. A bunch of states even allow online voter registration now, so...
My vote is to not spend taxpayer money for something people can just go register for themselves.
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Weird, as I feel like this would be an even better use of taxpayer funds than all the money currently spent in the guise of preventing voter fraud (which more often than not seems to be coming largely from the ranks of the party so determined to prevent it)...
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@goblin -- Other people have covered the idea of voter disenfranchisement pretty well, but I think there's something that may not have been explained that is true regardless of your political beliefs re: voter ID laws.
You don't (at least theoretically, given some of the voter roll purge issues that have been cropping up) have to register to vote every year or in every election. Theoretically speaking, once you register to vote, you should stay registered to vote provided that you do so every so often, don't move, and don't commit a felony in a state where that removes your right to vote, temporarily or permanently.
However, there have been issues of voter roll purges cropping up, so it's always worthwhile to check online -- which is really easy! -- as to whether or not you're registered and your registration information is correct. And there's people who only bother to vote in presidential elections. Or people who may be away from their polling place on election day that need an absentee ballot. Or who serve in the military, so they might be on base or overseas. Or are in college, so would need to change their registration if they wanted to vote where they go to school versus in their hometown. Or who have moved to a new area and simply forgot to update their registration. Or in my case I live in Pennsylvania, the most heavily gerrymandered state in the US. Recently (back in February), the state courts ruled against the drawings of district lines as they were and ordered them redrawn. My district -- which had been so heavily gerrymandered that my ZIP code literally had to be checked block by block based on your street address to figure out who your Congressional House representative is -- was completely redrawn, and the district I'm currently in versus the district my November vote will count for has totally changed. I used to be PA District 1 and I think I'm changing to PA District 3, or something. (I know the candidates, but keep forgetting the district ID.) For me, it was worth checking on my registration to make sure that my voter record had properly transferred and whether or not my polling place changed, so I don't show up at the wrong location and end up getting turned away.
So, yes, it's a pretty garbage system.... but until recently, for most people post-Voting Rights Act of 1965, the big problem was remembering to update their stuff by the deadline if their situation changed. Slightly less so with the overt "hahaha, you're poor/brown/foreign-born but a citizen/unlikely-to-vote-for-our-dickface-candidate?!? you don't get to vote!!!!" bullshit.
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@blondebot said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
Honestly, trying to set up automatic voter registration in a country of some... 300 million or so people sounds like a logistical nightmare and we're already crazy in debt.
Issue social security number, register person to vote, taking effect 18 years from date of birth. Done.
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@tnp said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
@blondebot said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
Honestly, trying to set up automatic voter registration in a country of some... 300 million or so people sounds like a logistical nightmare and we're already crazy in debt.
Issue social security number, register person to vote, taking effect 18 years from date of birth. Done.
District assignments.
You'd have to tie it to their address somehow, likely via tax return. Now what if they've moved since filing their taxes? Or are low enough in income they're not required to file? Or are a dependent on someone else's tax returns, as is the case for most 18-21 year olds?
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I actually would actively discourage people from voting. The percentage of voters is too high.
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@goblin said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
The fact you have to register to do something that is your full right has me so entirely baffled. Why is it like that? (Honest question, no sarcasm here.)
Isn't citizenship good enough?
Every four year over here, every eligible voter gets sent a voting card. No charge, no registering - we're already registered to be citizens. Then we go vote, bringing our voting card and ID, they compare it to the 'voting ledgers' and notes down that this person voted and which instances they voted for (and then of course there's several checks along the way before the final results are in.)
I MEAN RIGHT?
My country has a national identity document we all carry around. It's a number, and some of our most pertinent information, and our thumb print. Yes, I carry my thumbprint everywhere. My thumbprint is already in every conceivable database necessary in the country, probably, to be honest. And that's okay.
I also don't need to register to vote. In fact, voting is compulsory. I have to have an actual, justifiable reason not to vote or I could be fined, or even face jail time in the right conditions (i.e. I am already in breach of some other law or whatever). In practice, jailtime almost never happens and fines are pretty rare, too, but we also have all elections on Sundays and employers are required to allow their employees time to vote if they work on Sundays. We also have our voting centers designated to us based on our registered address, so I vote about seven blocks away, in the gym of a private school that is co-opted every election for that very reason. Argentine teens have the option to vote starting at age 16 and it becomes compulsory at 18, generating an interest in the political state of our country at an early age (though this is very recent and, unfortunately, too late to have saved us from the current clusterfuck we're suffering from). At 65, voting becomes optional again. If you old, you get to stay home (which is hilarious, because we all want the racist old people to opt-out but they keep getting their maids to drive them over so they can plug in their classist vote). Even immigrants can vote in local elections--just not national ones. So my brother, who's a US Citizen and an Argentine resident cannot vote for presidents or senators, but he can vote for the local governor elections, for example.
@tnp said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
@blondebot said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
Honestly, trying to set up automatic voter registration in a country of some... 300 million or so people sounds like a logistical nightmare and we're already crazy in debt.
Issue social security number, register person to vote, taking effect 18 years from date of birth. Done.
There is no reason not to do this except for vote disenfranchisement.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
