This Election Labyrinth

If I was an American citizen and could register to vote, I would be concerned. I would be calling my local elections office and printing a Massachusetts voter registration form in anticipation of the deadline tomorrow. I would do this because states across the country are lost in bureaucratic labyrinths before the vote on November 4—and they risk losing us with them.

With nine million new voters in America this election season, one would think elections offices would have plenty of work adding people to their voter rolls and sending out absentee ballots. In fact, attempts to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) have had egregious consequences. At least nine states have been found to accidentally and illegally remove voters from their lists. Moreover, increasingly strict identification requirements are holding up registrations and absentee ballots for unknown thousands of people.

In principle, HAVA was expected to guard against further nightmarish scenarios like those encountered during the 2000 election. Centralized electronic voter databases combined with strict ID requirements, for instance, were meant to help generate “clean” voter lists free of duplicate or fraudulent entries. Meanwhile, provisional voting was instituted in the 2004 election as a solution for people who don’t meet requirements on Election Day.

The problem with the complexity and stringency of regulations is that “cleaning up” a voting roll can amount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Voter purges are already dangerous when spelling mistakes or address changes can accidentally render someone ineligible. Last week, we learned how they could be still more problematic, as county clerks mixed up fields on records, improperly consulted Social Security databases, skirted standard purging procedures, or illegally altered rolls within 90 days of an election. In Louisiana, for instance, approximately half the purges effected in the last five weeks have gone unexplained.

Complicating the picture are the rigorous ID requirements for voter registering by mail, a problem that disproportionately affects college students. If the election office can’t contact the voter issuing a “flagged” application, he is either not added to the rolls (in states like Florida and Iowa) or has to vote by provisional ballot. That’s assuming that the flagged form is even processed before Election Day. When you add a college student’s need to vote absentee, the procedure gets even murkier.

Generally speaking, it’s safe to say that voting for college students is a genuine ordeal. Jetting home on Election Day is usually not an option, so we must either register to vote at college or vote absentee back home. This means worrying where our registration should be, navigating forms, deadlines, the occasional photocopy or notarization, and finally digging up the right address and that elusive 42-cent stamp.

It is Kafkaesque procedures like those in Mississippi—where people must actually call in to request a request form for an absentee ballot—that convince me that unforgiving voting laws are greater culprits in low youth turnout than political disinterest. In a recent IOP Survey, conducted last spring, 72 percent of surveyed college students said they would be voting in the general election, a 10-point increase relative to 2000. Meanwhile, ask a college student how he can vote absentee: According to the 2003 Survey, one in three students will tell you he has no idea.

At a hearing in Congress three weeks ago, we heard clear solutions to free students from a jungle of election laws. Push for polling places at universities. Make university-issued photo ID an acceptable form of identification. Clarify residency rules on the universal voter registration form. Make forms and information easily available online. And as for HAVA, stop letting procedural errors disenfranchise people on the eve of landmark elections. These are all just causes, but they will only earn legitimacy if more students speak up.

Harvard students: Across the United States, dozens of county election offices are currently processing your registration forms. It’s your duty to make sure you’re not falling through the cracks, and to let your local officials know that you care about those people who do. If I was an American citizen, I’d register soon and vote in November just to prove that point.



Alice J.M. Gissinger ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Dunster House.