MORE DMV INCOMPETENCE IN CONNECTICUT. I asked in this post why the passport office and the DMV are bywords for government indifference and incompetence–why governments don’t make sure they are putting their best foot forward. My daughter Annalisa registered to vote in mid-September at the Connecticut DMV, at the same time that she renewed her driver’s license. We remarked on how convenient it was. But when she went to vote today, there was no record of the registration. The workers at the polls had encountered several other cases like this, so they advised her to vote for President only at the city hall. At the city hall, we were told that there were a number of cases like hers.
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Did they let her vote?
She had a choice of a provisional ballot which would be counted if the registration ever turned up (after six weeks) and the election was close or of driving to city hall and voting only for President. She chose to vote only for President. Annalisa had driven up for Virginia in part so that she could vote. We were all very disappointed. All the officials of both parties that I asked about this afterward were remarkably indifferent about the disenfranchised voters. Their main message was that the system is so fragmented that no one is accountable or can prevent this kind of thing from happening.
I know several people who didn’t get their absentee ballots until after the election, or not at all. One of which was from Stamford. This is denying people their basic rights as American citizens.
And of course when the wait to vote becomes many hours, there is an enormous cost to voting, which after all is subject to strong collective good effects anyway. It is like a poll tax. I wonder what the estimated dollar cost to vote was this year summed over all those who voted. Elmer
If you take my view that voting is something people find rewarding, whether or not it can be shown to affect results, that large dollar cost is a measure of how important voting is to people.
I certainly did not find voting to be rewarding, given my experiences with it so far. After being inundated for weeks upon weeks by everyone, the sleaziest D-list stars to snobby archorpeople, lecturing about how “fun and sexy” and “patriotic” voting was, I found it the most discouraging, depressing bureaucratic mess I’ve encountered in a long time. And as Nick commented, my experience with the absentee ballot back in 2004 was also difficult.
The worst part was when I dropped my ballot in the voting box and the poll attendant next to it said to me, “And do the right thing next time.” I’d also like to add that another poll attendant told me I should’ve called to confirm I was registered–can you imagine how insane that would be, if EVERY citizen had to call to confirm?–and another attendant immediately responded with a story of a woman who’d called the night before to confirm her registration, was confirmed, and then showed up the next day to vote and found that she was not on the registered voter list. There was no way to win.
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