Good morning!
This is the weekly DKos Asheville open thread where we try to get together every Saturday morning around eleven, and then drift in and out throughout the day. We hope this group serves to reinvigorate us locally and regionally here on Daily Kos, building on the sense of community that's grown through our online engagement. DKos Asheville can give us all a better sense of connection, a better understanding of who these people are that we stand with, work with, and share with in the political process. We hope, through this community, that we can do a better job of leveraging our orange passion for progressive politics to help elect more and better Democrats.
If you would like to host a weekly open thread, please let us know.
Well, we have still not heard back from Westgate Earthfare, our first choice for a location for our DKos Asheville voter registration event. We still think this is an excellent location, so we'll be following up with them.
We do now have a stack of registration forms, both English and Spanish.
When I was at the county Board of Elections office, the very helpful woman there pointed out that the new voter ID laws are not effective until the 2016 elections, while the remainder of the new voter suppression laws do not take effect until 2014. Thus for the upcoming local elections this fall, the new rules are not in effect.
The deadline to register to vote in the upcoming primary is September 13; and the deadline to register to vote in the upcoming general election is October 11.
I'm thinking that one of the things that we can and should be doing is educating people on the importance of voting in local elections. So in addition to registering voters, we can also be reminding folks of the upcoming elections, and of the importance of voting.
You can review Randall's notes on our planning so far in last week's open thread.
We hope to make this voter registration event a fun event that we do together, essentially setting up a table, bringing chairs to sit in, and having an enjoyable afternoon talking and registering folks. So please consider volunteering to hang out with us!
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On a separate note - the forecast this morning is for no rain today. We'll see.
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And of course, if you haven't done so yet, please send your RSVP's and Maybe's for our October 19 meetup to Randall (randallt) so he can add them to the list in the "New Day" diaries. And it's ok to go ahead and send him a Maybe, as you can always upgrade to RSVP once you get all that other stuff erased from your calendar. We currently have 13 RSVP's and 10 Maybe's!
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Enjoy your Saturday; rain or shine!