Voter Registration Is Not Enough!
It’s around this time of the perpetual election season that I hear about the
continual push for voter registration.
“Have you registered yet? You need
to! I’ve registered! Have you?
You have to! Your friends need to
register too! Everyone needs to register!”
And the annoying thing about this time of the perpetual election season
is that there are so many different ways and places to supposedly
register. You go renew your driver’s license,
and you get asked if you want to register to vote. You go pay the water bill and you get asked
if you want to register to vote. It’s
gotten to the point where you can’t even get
a chicken biscuit without someone with a clipboard wanting to know if you’ve
registered to vote!
And you have all of these groups that are so frigging proud of how many
people they’ve registered, like they expect to win a free trip to Disneyland
for their efforts. Or at least a free
toaster. Or bus fare. Or maybe a shirt that says “I registered half
the state and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
And then, after the registration push, is the political hype. “Oh this is going to be a different
election! We have so many people
registered to vote now! We’ve set a new
registration record this time around! We’re
going to change the face of politics with this election! We can feel it! We know it’s going to happen! Look at all of these people who were
motivated to register to vote!”
Big. Flipping. Deal.
Here’s the problem... you know all of those people that you’ve registered
to vote? Turns out, they don’t actually vote!
All of that effort, all of those programs, all of the various ways and
drives to get people to register to vote, they ultimately mean nothing if all
of those people don’t follow through and actually show up at the voting places
to vote!
I actually saw that here in
Georgia just two years ago. The
Democrats here in this state went on a big voter registration push to get all
of the various demographics that they supposedly support to register to vote,
and then they made a big stinking deal about the tens-if-not-hundreds of
thousands of “new voters” being registered. And their pollsters factored it all
in and they told the public that the status quo was in for a serious kick in
the nuts this time around. They were
going to match the GOP’s self-righteous bible-thumping voting block this time
around, if not surpass them. Especially
for the big positions like the governor and U.S. Senate! This was going to be a horserace, folks! We could even see a few run-off elections
because of this!
Turned out it was a landslide for the GOP. The pollsters weren’t just wrong... they were
housing bubble “Big Short”
wrong!
So what the hell happened?
Simple. All of those people that
registered to vote... never did show up to vote!
All of that effort to get people to vote, all of the work that was done
to supposedly “energize the constituents” and get them “engaged in the political
system”, ended up doing absolutely jack squat!
But, hey, at least the really eager volunteers who busted their asses
and went above-and-beyond to register all of those people got that free
Disneyland trip... or T-shirt... or at least a pat on the back. And that’s important too, right?
No, it’s not. It’s a waste, and you all damned well know it!
Let’s get brutally honest here... voter registration means absolutely
nothing if you cannot follow up with those people showing up in the voting
booths to actually vote! What good is having
tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of supposedly “new voters”
registered to vote if they don’t bother to vote afterward? It’s like paying for a gym card and then not
bothering to show up to actually use it!
Don’t get me wrong; voter registration does play an important role in
voting. But just being registered to
vote does not make you a voter. Voting
makes you a voter! When you actually go
to the polling place and you tell the clerk your name and she checks your name
with the registration roll, and then hands you a voting ballot or a computer
card so you can go into that booth and cast your ballot, that completes the
whole process. That is when the
registration effort really pays off.
Everything before that is just speculation. It’s empty without the action!
This is where all of those social groups fail with their voter
registration efforts. They plan for the
registration part, but they don’t follow through with getting those people to
the ballot box. You have their
information. At the very least, you need
to use that information to coordinate transporting those newly-registered people
to those voting booths. Don’t expect
them to instantly know where the polling places are. If they were concerned about voting
beforehand, they’d be doing the registration all by themselves and finding out
where the polling places are without you.
And that’s the part that bothers me as well. If the groups behind the massive efforts at
voter registration aren’t really concerned about getting the voters to the
polls, then why do they have that information in the first place? Mailing lists are very valuable to certain
businesses and special interest groups.
I’d be suspicious about who would end up with my information after I put
my name down on your clipboard so you could win that free Disneyland trip or
cheap T-shirt.
It’s good to know that certain groups care about getting everyone
eligible to vote to actually fulfill their obligation, but the half-assed ways
some of these groups are handling the process makes me wonder what the ultimate
agenda is. Too many groups in America
consider the election process to be nothing more than a big frigging game to be
manipulated, and unfortunately we are the ones that pay the price for that
game. That’s how we ended up with
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as major candidates this time around. If you really want that to change, then we
all need to stop playing games with the process.
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