First of all a shout-out to Kristen. I was up before 4 a.m. yesterday, dragging my sick self out to my election gig (which lasted until nearly 10 p.m.) with a carafe of Traditional Medicinals Throat Coat Tea (with honey). I talked the livelong day and believe it really saved my voice.

Our polling place covers four NIU (DeKalb) campus precincts.

The Disenfranchised & the Fail Safe Voters

A huge, huge problem with the students’ registrations is that they move all the time and do not think to update their voters’ registrations. Many would have been turned away yesterday for this reason except for Fail Safe. Instead of purging a registration entirely when the voter’s mailed card is returned “undeliverable,” the registration remains in the system as “suspended” (actually, they quite descriptively call it being “in suspense.”) Though the voter’s info does not appear in the rolls, a phone call to election authority headquarters confirms the old info. The voter then updates the mailing address and is entitled to vote a Federal ballot at his/her old precinct. (This is different from obtaining a Provisional ballot, in which case the voter maintains that his/her registration address is still the correct one.)

The saddest story of the day concerned the de facto disenfranchisement of a group of freshmen who had registered last fall in their dormitory cafeteria. Read the rest of this entry