Sure, you can cast a provisional ballot, but will it be counted? What if you live in a different district? What if it’s a special election? The district my friend moved into had a primary for state representative decided by just 93 votes less than two years ago – which precinct you can vote in, even in the same city, can have a major effect.
Mistakes happen. So do computer glitches. Sometimes people just don’t write legibly on their registration forms, and get registered on the wrong street, or with a misspelled name. Some voters may find out the way my friend did – if they have a friend at city hall, or they’re politically active and collect signature sheets, for example. But most voters won’t find out there’s a problem with their registration until they go to the polls to vote.
Same day registration, aka election day registration, is a simple idea: If you go to your polling place and find you’re not on their list, you register to vote, right there. Your new registration takes precedence over any other registration you previously had, just as when you register at other times. A number of states, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, and next-door New Hampshire, have same day registration. They’ve been doing this for years, have found hardly any fraud with the system, and have much higher voter turnout than states without Same Day Registration.
Why don’t we have it here in Massachusetts?
Then I can vote for Kerry Healey in Worcester, Dorchester, Springfield, Plymouth, and, and,…
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‘Hardly any Fraud’ – the NEW BMG Standard!
There are a lot of things you could do but shouldn’t, and this, like some of them, is a crime. If you go to a bunch of different polling places and register and vote, you’ve just provided them with all the evidence they need to find out what you did, identify you, and catch you afterward.
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In practice, this rarely happens. We’ve seen election day registration work well for many years in a number of states.
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You could just as well say that you could vote for president in Florida and Ohio and New Mexico and Iowa… and indeed, you probably could. You’d even have a better chance of slipping through without consequences, than the scenario you propose – because town clerks in Massachusetts do commicate with each other and with the state elections department, but different states rarely communicate voter information between them. And yet, tempting though it may be, very very few people do it.
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On the other hand, we know that a very large number of people don’t vote at all in each election due to registration issues, and that same day registration solves most of those issues. It increases the turnout of legimitate voters by a lot.
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We already have some voter fraud, but election day registration would have hardly any effect on how much of it we have. Its effect would mainly be increased turnout. Essentially what you’re suggesting is that it’s better to have in place a policy that results in a thousand legitimate voters not voting, than to have a policy that would result in 2 or 3 of them committing fraud (and probably getting caught and being punished for it).
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By analogy, “the job of the police is easier in a police state”.
Sure, sometimes a real criminal gets off on a technicality – but that’s no reason to get rid of due process. Similarly, sometimes a voter commits fraud – but that’s no reason to put obstacles in the way of legitimate voters.
Whoops! Maybe Shaws…or Christy’s….
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Cos – we have registration drives. We now allow RMV registration. It is in every newspaper what the deadlines are. YOU CANNOT MAKE PEOPLE VOTE BY MAKING IT EASIER AND EASIER.
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IMHO (or NSHO, as the case may be), much of this is due to the elimination of Civics in school. More and more people are voting ignoramouses. Also, they have heard for so long that ALL politicians are corrupt, that THEIR vote doesn’t count… they believe it. And don’t bother.
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I was distrubed years ago when a registration drive was held in a school for the mentally disabled. Do you think THEY were reading the impact statements for the ballot questions, or just coloring in the box where teacher said?
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Cos, the world is run by the people who show up. In business and on voting day.
And that’s why we need same day registration. It makes it easier for more of the potential electorate to show up, which allows for a better overal democracy. Do you want maximal democracy or don’t you?
Sheesh, if you don’t understand the concept of a deadline, that is posted and listed everywhere, how would you know what this thing called a governor is, what it does, and who is this Mitt Hillman anyway? Never mind your state senator– isn’t it Kennedy, or is it that Kerry guy who ran for the Supreme Court last year? Why is it so desireable that these people vote? They have every opportunity to do so, and yet do not.
it promotes changing politicians…
yet current incumbents know it is in their interest to block election day registration because under the current system, incumbents won. Changing that system (with election day registration) would introduce an unknown factor, a new risk to the safety of an incumbent’s seat.
I wonder if you read my post, and what you’d tell someone who believes they are registered and then finds they’re not on the list on election day? That happens to a very large number of people. “You don’t understand the concept of a deadline and therefore don’t deserve to vote”?
Please note that my comment was not appended directly to your post, but was a reply to another comment, which expressed the notion that the greater the number of voters, the better it will be, as if the point of the endeavor is simply to drive up the count of warm bodies pulling a lever. There are plenty of people who are blissfully unaware that there is an election, never mind what the election is for or who is running. My point is that voters who do the equivalent of the low-stakes test taker and fill in Choice “C” for every question have a negative contribution to the process.
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Your post, on the other hand, pointed out the issue of a person who is an actual voter who is accidentaly unregistered, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. You expressed a lack of confidence in provisional ballots, which is the intended remedy for the problem. I don’t know how provisional ballots work, and thus did not post a comment to the initial post.
Your snarky comment just doesn’t seem to square with the facts. If I read what you wrote correctly I am under the impression that you are suggesting same day voter reg can equal fraud. From my experience in Wisconsin this isn’t the case. We have managed same day voter reg for as long as I can remember and we have never had three cities simultaneously under investigation for “voting irregularily.”
in the 6 states that have had EDR for over 12 years (three have had it for more than 30 years), there have been no incidents of fraud related to the reform. Montana, the seventh state, just adopted EDR. Election Day Registration is a more secure way of registering than what we have now. (And there is federal funding through HAVA available to upgrade our technology and systems.)
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Today, I can register pretty much anywhere and no one ever asks for ID. Unless I do it myself, I can’t be 100% certain that the registration form will be turned in. In my work with various cities, election officials have told me stories of receivng batches of reg forms after the deadline that were in fact over a year old. I, who registered ahead of time, come up as the loser in this scenario.
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With EDR, I could correct this problem at the polls by re-registering. I’d be required to show proof of residency and proof of identification before being able to register and vote on a regular ballot. And I’d have to do this with an election official. With the right technology, this can be done in real-time so that I couldn’t then go to another polling location and try it again (which is a felony, by the way).
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And in case some don’t think registration problems are real, check out this 2003 Voting in Massachusetts report by the CalTech/MIT Voter Technology Project and MassVOTE’s 2004 Election Protection report. Very few of the issues raised in either of these reports have been addressed, much less resolved.
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(Full disclosure – I’m the former Executive Director of MassVOTE and, currently, John Bonifaz’s campaign manager.)
Same-day registration increases voting rates by 15%. With rate increases like that, same-day registration is obviously the single most important voting reform that can be done (details and statistics at http://www.common-se… )
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But the large and inevitable increase in voter turnout is also exactly the reason that the incumbents and the party establishment do NOT want to implement same-day registration. They want LOW turnoout, from their regular reliable voters, and would prefer to avoid all new registrations. That’s especially true in Massachusetts, where “new registrants” so often means “newcomers to the state” or “students and young people”, both of which imply a strong likelihood of voting progressive. The establishment does not want progressive voters, so they fight all voting reforms with a myriad of excuses.
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Voter fraud is the worst excuse possible. As far as I’m concerned, INDIVIDUAL voter fraud by is a non-issue. It is rare, and almost always irrelevant (because it only affects one vote at a time). We SHOULD be concered about INSTITUTIONAL voter fraud, such as Katherine Harris’ purging of black males from the Florida voting rolls. The current safeguards against individual voter fraud are entirely adequate — you say your name and address, and you might get recognized, and that keeps almost everybody honest. The current safeguards against insitutional voter fraud are certainly inadequate — but that’s a different posting. For this posting, I see the usual arguments about voter fraud from same-day registration — but that’s really a red herring.
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Election commissioners will complain that it’s more work for them. And of course it is — but that’s their job! Somehow, election commissioners in Minnesota, and in 5 other states, manage this task. And they have better election results because of it. We would too.
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More details from past posts on the same subject:
http://www.jessegord…
Sometimes democracy transcends politics.
This reminds me of something that happened during Jesse’s campaign for city council last year. He had a fundraiser at the Middle East, with music and prominent endorsers and everything, and a couple of protesters showed up to hand out flyers to people coming in the door. Unfortunately for them, their flyers were full of typos, so they ran home to make corrected versions, and by the time they came back, half the people who were going to the fundraiser were already inside. So they missed offerring their flyers to a lot of people.
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Jesse got one of their handouts, which was of course very anti-Jesse. In his speech to the crowd inside, he held up the flyer and said he got it from some protesters outside. But he didn’t then criticize either the protesters or the content of their flyer. Instead, he complimented them on participating in Democracy, said he thought it was great that they came, and encouraged his supporters to go find them on the way out and get a copy of their handout.
Actually, compared to having to deal with extra provisional ballots, same day registration could be a net labor saver for the local elections departments and poll workers.