Getting Out the Vote:
The Election of 2006

November 4, 2006

Emily and I are looking forward to voting on Tuesday.. I, for one, find it hard to think about anything except the coming election.. wondering whether the Republicans will be held accountable for some highly incompetent governing.

This will be my first time voting since I lived in California.. which does not mean I made no attempt to vote while I lived in Atlanta. For the Bush-Gore race of 2000, I had just relocated to Atlanta and apparently missed the deadline for sending in my voter materials, and thus was ineligible on election day. By the time the Bush-Kerry contest came around in 2004, Emily and I were newly married, and I made sure we got our voter registration materials off in time. Then a funny thing happened.. Emily received her voter information, but mine simply never came. I mailed the material at the same time.. dropping the two enveloped in the same mail slot.. yet only Emily was registered. I called the people in charge of voter registration, but they had no record of me having sent in any material.. and so I would have no vote once again. The really funny thing is that a full three months later I received my voter registration material in the mail. My materials had been mysteriously misdirected to the wrong district.

Georgia has quite restrictive voter registration rules.. The forms must be completed well ahead of time and the voter must show legal identification. A lot of that is defended necessary to keep the vote safe from illegal immigrants or fraud. But let's cut through the rationalization crap. These policies are aimed at making it tough for those who are mobile or who do not pay a lot of attention to politics to vote. I lost my vote twice as a result of those policies.. and I am above average in education and attention to politics. The registration policies in Georgia clearly favor those who are stable.. i.e. have lived in the same place for a long time and thus get connected to the system and stay connected.

This year voting is going to be a lot easier. In Wisconsin voters can register on election day.. so we just show up with proof of residence in the form of a bill, and we should be able to cast our vote no problem. It is hard not to notice how much more user friendly the system here in Wisconsin is..

But what is the goal of our democracy anyway? If I dare ask a big question. If we believe in democracy, then it would seem that the goal of everyone should be to maximize voter turnout.. to make sure that everyone with a stake has a voice in the local and national choices that confront voters on election day. It strikes me as problematic that voter turn-out efforts are so highly partisan in orientation. We have entered an era in which democracy is managed more than actually encouraged.. which is all rich in irony given our propensity for making war to bring democracy to others.

We are 6 years from the contested election of 2000, and if anything was obvious after the dust settled, it was that our infrastructure of voting needed to be updated and repaired. But it was clear that the Republicans did not really want an update that could solidify our democracy well into this century.. and strengthen the appearance of fairness. It is hard to shake the feeling that a thorough update in voting equipment and registration policies would lead to a few more Democratic votes.. and so democracy is slowly displaced by partisanship.