Martin Austermuhle
Photo by Burnt Pixel
You know how when you move you often forget to do any number of things? Like get a new drivers license, tell your bank your new address or forward all your mail? How about that voter registration? When’s the last time you checked on that?
Now’s a great time. The Pew Center on the States published a report this week detailing what a mess the country’s voter rolls are — one in eight voter registrations aren’t valid or accurate, 1.8 million dead people are still listed as active voters and close to three million people are registered to vote in more than one state. Even worse, some 51 million people who are eligible to vote just aren’t registered. That’s 24 percent of the country’s voting-aged people.
Part of the responsibility certainly lays with the country’s many elections agencies, but there’s also some personal fault at hand — if you’ve lived in Capitol Hill for the last three years but are still listed as voting in the Columbia Heights precinct you first called home when you got here, you should probably go ahead and update your voter registration. (It’s not hard; just go here.)
With the District’s primaries landing on April 3 this year, there’s an even better reason to make sure your registration is up to snuff. While you can still do same-day registration or cast a provisional ballot if something is wrong with your registration, what you won’t be able to do is vote in the primaries if you’re not registered as a Democrat, Republican or Statehood Green. (In 2010, Mayor Adrian Fenty tried to get independent voters to be allowed to do day-of party registration, but was shot down.) The last day to choose a party or change from one to another is March 5. After that, well, you’ll be left waiting until the November general election — and by then, many of the local D.C. races will have been decided.
Also, if you’ve been in the District for a while but just haven’t voted and have moved around a lot, it might be worth checking to see that your name wasn’t purged alongside the 98,000 or more names that were removed from the rolls in mid-2010.
To begin with, check your registration status here. You can always tweet the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics (@DCBOEE) if you have any questions; they’re very good at responding.
