Kurt Cobain for Grundy County Attorney

Recommend...del.icio.us Digg it Furl Netvouz Netscape Newsvine reddit Yahoo MyWeb January 2nd, 2007 at 02:11pm Geraldine

Grundy County is the only county in that state that lists all of its write-in votes for every office. This includes a vote for Kurt Cobain for County Attorney (a post for which he was ineligible as he is not a member of the Iowa Bar) Drew has some fun with this but there’s a more serious lesson to be drawn from what isn’t listed.

What isn’t listed is the number of voters who were turned away from the polls because they weren’t registered to vote or weren’t registered to vote at that precinct or county. Even turning away one person damages our democracy. It’s absurd that anyone who wants to vote gets turned away. But it’s a by-product of our very flawed system of voter registration. Everytime that someone moves, they have to fill out a brand new form and if they haven’t filled out their form in time, they get disenfranchised. The result is a system that not only produces adminstrative issues at the polls like those we experienced in October but, more importantly, keeps people from voting. The one easy solution is same day registration, which allows someone to register and vote on the same day. Our neighbors in Minnesota and Wisconsin have this, as well as our early primary rival, New Hampshire. In fact, speaking of early primaries, you can register to vote when you show up at your precinct caucus in 2008, but you can’t do so for the General Election.

Hopefully, the State Legislature will take this issue up when it meets this month. One of the first orders of business for the new session is to remove impediments to absentee voting that the Republicans set up after the 2002 election.  With a Democratic majority in both Houses, it’s a rare opportunity to move forward and guarantee that every Iowan is able to vote in the future.

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• Progress On Same Day Registration
• Iowa GOP Tries Make To Voting Harder, Again
• A (Partial) Defense of the Iowa Caucuses
• Candidates become enmeshed in CIETC
• New Jersey Sets An Example For Iowa

Entry Filed under: Miscellaneous, State Politics, Voting Rights

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