Tag: registration
Some Voters In Chicago Wait 9 Hours To Vote: ‘I Just Didn’t Want To Be Denied’

Some Voters In Chicago Wait 9 Hours To Vote: ‘I Just Didn’t Want To Be Denied’

By Quinn Ford, Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — The speeches were long over and most of the races had been called, but Decorda McGee still waited in line at a Chicago polling place to cast his ballot.

After nine hours, McGee finally voted around 3 a.m. Wednesday, the last person in a long, slow line of people who took advantage of same-day registration voting.

“I just didn’t want to be denied,” McGee said after walking out of his North Side polling place. “I wasn’t going to be denied my right to vote, and that was the sentiment of everybody in there.”

Under a law signed this past summer, people were allowed to both register and vote on Election Day at designated polling places throughout the state.

People who had not registered to vote but had lived in their precincts for at least 30 days before the election could bring two forms of identification, one of which included a current address. The ballots will be considered “provisional” and set aside from the regular vote count until the registration information provided by the new voter could be authenticated.

But same-day registration was not available at every polling place, which led to confusion for some voters. In suburban Cook County, there were fewer than two dozen same-day registration locations. Election authorities in each county posted same-day registration locations on their websites.

Chicago had five designated sites across the city for those who wanted to register and vote on the same day, but long lines and problems with voting equipment meant some, like McGee, had to wait for hours.

By the time McGee voted, virtually all the races had been decided. In the hotly contested gubernatorial race, Bruce Rauner claimed victory before midnight but Gov. Pat Quinn said he would wait until every vote was counted.
McGee, a Democrat, said Quinn’s refusal to concede “really pumped me to stay.”

“He’s not giving up, we’re not giving up,” McGee said. “It was really important.”

Jennifer Omoregie, 29, was also one of the last to cast her vote. She said she was frustrated as the results of races come in while she was still in line. But she too refused to leave.

“It’s my right. If I’m here at 3 a.m., you still have to let me vote even though it’s Nov. 5 because I was here before 7,” she said.

Omoregie blamed mismanagement and a lack of polling equipment and volunteers for the long line. She saw at least 100 people leave without voting, she said.

“It was a zoo. They didn’t manage it at all,” she said. “It was completely ridiculous.”

As the end of the line cast their ballots, fellow voters and election judges cheered and applauded.

Sara Waller, 23, said the morale of the weary voters was boosted throughout the evening by well-wishers. At one point, an election judge from the suburbs stopped by to give Waller and others snacks after seeing the long lines on the news, Waller said.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel also showed up to distribute pizza, Omoregie and Waller said.

“Everytime I was getting ready to throw in the towel, something made me stay a little bit longer,” Waller said. “Once you reach a certain point in line, you can’t really leave.”

At the Chicago and Cook County election headquarters downtown, there was more than an hour wait at 10 a.m., with more than 100 people in a line snaking through the basement, waiting for the chance to register and vote.

At the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, dozens of residents lined up early Tuesday to register, change their addresses and vote.

Although it was a lengthy, five-step process just to get to the voting booth, residents waited.

It took Twyla Speed, 38, nearly two hours to cast a ballot, she said. A new resident of Bronzeville, she said she reported to her local polling place at 6:30 a.m. and was told she wasn’t registered and had to then travel to the King Center to start over.

“I’m really disappointed,” Speed said. “I purchased my home in May. When I went to the department of motor vehicles, I had my address and everything switched over. Then this morning, I’m not registered. How did this happen? No one is sure. I just hope this isn’t another way to manipulate voters.”

With a stack of mail in hand and several forms of identification, Speed tolerated the long line. But she wasn’t certain many people would be as determined as she was Tuesday.

“I thought this was taken care of. Then my registration isn’t in the system. I can’t help but wonder: Did somebody drop the ball?”

Photo via Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr

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California Democrats Sign Up Thousands Of New Voters, But Will They Cast Ballots?

California Democrats Sign Up Thousands Of New Voters, But Will They Cast Ballots?

By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Democrats in California have signed up tens of thousands of new voters in recent months, but a big question in Tuesday’s election is whether enough of them will cast ballots to stave off erosion of the party’s dominance in the state.

The new voters, many of them Latino or Asian, are heavily concentrated in fiercely contested legislative districts in Orange and Ventura counties, the South Bay area of Los Angeles, and the Antelope and San Joaquin valleys. Fearing that a national election climate favoring Republicans could cost them legislative seats, Democrats dispatched hundreds of troops to register new voters in those areas.

Adding to Democrats’ worries have been a lackluster governor’s race and a menu of less-than-alluring ballot measures, all but ensuring a low-turnout election — which typically draws a disproportionately large share of older white voters who lean Republican.

“There’s nothing sexy on the ballot,” said Sergio Carrillo, an adviser to Democrat Tony Mendoza in his pitched battle for an eastern Los Angeles County state Senate seat that would normally be out of reach for Republicans.

Most Democrats running for statewide office — Gov. Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris among them — appear to have little to fear Tuesday, polls show. The party’s secretary of state candidate, state Sen. Alex Padilla of Pacoima, is the one who appears to face the most serious challenge from a Republican rival, Pepperdine University think tank director Pete Peterson.

Democrats are also certain to maintain a strong majority of the state’s congressional delegation, although a few of the most hard-fought U.S. House races in the country are in California. Voters in San Diego, Ventura and Sacramento counties have been swamped by mail and other advertising in those contests.

But Republicans are all but sure to maintain their House majority; the question is by how big a margin.

The stakes are arguably higher in the California Legislature. Democrats are trying to regain their two-thirds supermajority in the Senate and maintain the one they have in the Assembly. A supermajority enables Democrats to raise taxes and put some ballot measures before voters with no Republican support, among other things.

Republicans acknowledge the Democrats’ heavy investment in registration drives could prove a formidable threat Tuesday — but not if the new voters don’t bother to cast ballots.

“The biggest obstacle for them remains: Can they get those new voters to the polls?” said Peter DeMarco, a spokesman for state Senate Republican leader Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar.

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Most voters, though, are likely to cast their ballots by mail. Republicans are encouraged that in some key districts, GOP voters are returning their mail ballots at a higher rate than Democrats — despite the surge in newly registered Democrats.

“It doesn’t appear that they’re voting,” GOP consultant Matt Rexroad said, referring to information posted daily by Political Data, a nonpartisan firm that tracks voting patterns.

In the state Senate race pitting Mendoza against Downey Mayor Mario Guerra, a Republican, volunteers on both sides fanned out across the district Monday, placing fliers on doorknobs.

“People have made their decisions,” Guerra said. “Now it’s getting them out to vote.”

Some high-profile local contests are taking place Tuesday, but none with the capacity to attract large numbers of voters.

In Los Angeles County, corruption scandals have produced spirited contests for sheriff and county assessor. And the $9.5 million contest to succeed Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who is retiring, has shaped up as a labor versus business duel between former state lawmaker Sheila Kuehl, the union favorite, and onetime Santa Monica Mayor Bobby Shriver.

Statewide, TV advertising has focused mainly on the contest for state schools superintendent and Propositions 45 and 46, both health care and insurance measures.

Contests for governor or U.S. Senate normally inspire relatively high turnout in statewide elections in non-presidential years. But Brown is so heavily favored for re-election over GOP rival Neel Kashkari that he has declined to run TV ads asking for support, sticking instead to spots urging voters to pass Propositions 1 and 2, a water bond measure and budget savings package, respectively.

As a whole, said Political Data Vice President Paul Mitchell, it’s not the kind of ballot likely to spark the enthusiasm of many voters.

“They’re not waking up in the morning thinking, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen in the superintendent of public instruction race,’ ” Mitchell said.

For Democrats, a key task — now that it’s too late to post ballots in the mail and be sure they arrive before the Tuesday deadline — is to watch that voters drop off absentee ballots at polling places instead.

“You do three-fourths of the job by registering someone, but you definitely have to make sure they understand how to vote,” said Kathy Bowler, a Democratic operative who oversaw some of the party’s voter signup work.

Since the last gubernatorial election four years ago, the registration drive helped add more than 88,000 Democrats to the voter rolls, while the number of Republicans dropped by 350,000. But nearly 647,000 other new voters declined to state a preference for any party.

Photo via Amy The Nurse via Flickr

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Here’s What You Need To Know For National Voter Registration Day

Here’s What You Need To Know For National Voter Registration Day

Tuesday is National Voter Registration Day, a concerted effort by volunteers, organizations, celebrities, and leaders across the country to register Americans to vote before important upcoming elections. This year’s midterm elections, which will be held on November 4, will decide 417 members of the U.S. Congress, 36 governors, and 46 state legislatures.

If you need to register, you should check out your state’s elections website. To find the correct website, go to rockthevote.com, click on your state, and you will be redirected to the state elections page. In order to vote in any state you must be a citizen of the United States, 18 or older, and, at the very least, a resident of that state on the day of the election. By federal law, a state cannot require you to be a resident for longer than 30 days to be eligible to vote.

You can print out registration forms and mail them in, but if you are registering for the first time with a mail-in form, most states will require that you show some kind of federal or state-issued I.D. with your address on it, or a current utility bill, bank statement, or paycheck when you vote. But states’ requirements for documentation do vary, so use the state election website to find the specific requirements.

Some states, like Iowa and Colorado, have switched to online registration, but most still have a paper-based process.

Apart from using the state website to download registration forms to print out and mail in, you can also pick up the necessary forms at your local secretary of state’s office.

The forms must be dropped off or postmarked by the registration deadline. You can also register at your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, provided you meet the deadline and are an eligible voter per other state requirements.

Another way to register is by a third-party site or registration drive. Third-party sites like Turbovote.org, NationalVoterRegistrationDay.org, Rockthevote.com, and Vote411.org help facilitate and streamline the process instead of having to work through your state’s own election page.

In almost all states, you can register to vote by mail using the National Mail Voter Registration Form; North Dakota, Wyoming, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands do not accept this form, while New Hampshire accepts it only as a request for an absentee voter mail-in registration form.

You can also use the National Mail Voter Registration Form to update your registration if you changed your name or address, or want to register with a political party.

In order to be eligible to vote, you must submit your registration form by your state’s deadline. You can find a complete list of registration deadlines by state on USA.gov‘s voting page.

If you happen to live in North Dakota, you don’t have to register at all. North Dakota is the only state that doesn’t require its residents to register in order to vote.

Photo via Neighborhood Centers Inc. via Flickr

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