Register now and vote when you choose!

I’ve been doing my thing with the Georgia Justice Project and VoteRidersGA for the past 10 days or so. Writing notes to people encouraging them to register and vote. Georgia, it turns out, has lots of people convicted of felonies who have either completed probation or can get off it. They can vote without paying fines or jumping through other hoops.

Of course I’ll never know what impact this will have, if any. But given the extensive efforts to limit voting, I’m willing to pitch in to encourage it. This is a non-partisan effort, even if I am a registered Democrat (who sometimes has voted Republican).

The question of course is what motivates people to limit voting. If you ask, they will tell you they want to limit voting fraud, not voting. But there is no evidence in any of the 50 states of significant voter fraud. And the “anti-fraud” efforts are concentrated in Black and other minorities areas as well as college campuses. That tells you all you need to know about the real purpose. Their efforts are counterproductive when it comes to fraud. Those challenging voter registrations are tying up election officials in mountains of paperwork, making it difficult to maintain the quality of elections in battleground states.

Nevertheless, there has been some progress in opening up the election process to encourage broader participation, partly due to the COVID-19 epidemic. The National Council of State Legislatures lists a number of states that permit “vote by mail”:

• Eight states—California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington and the District of Columbia—allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail.
• Two states—Nebraska and North Dakota—permit counties to opt into conducting elections by mail.
• Nine states—Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming—allow specific small elections to be conducted by mail.
• Four states—Idaho, Minnesota, New Jersey and New Mexico—permit mostly-mail elections for certain small jurisdictions.

Forty-seven states offer some sort of “early” voting before Election Day.

Polls can make inaccurate projections for many reasons. But one of the more difficult factors to take into account is turnout. At this point in the campaign, that is the main objective of both the Democrats and the Republicans. Convincing the few remaining undecided voters is far more difficult and labor intensive than getting your own cadres to the polls. So register, or check your registration, and vote when you can!