So this past September, my eldest daughter turned 18. One of the first things she did was register to vote. She visited California's voter registration website, filled out the form, submitted it, and was directed to a confirmation page telling her she was registered to vote.
My daughter is politically engaged and computer-savvy. She signed up to be a poll worker next Tuesday, and because she was assigned to a polling place that is not our own, she figured she would vote early today after attending her poll-worker training session. There is nothing particularly interesting on our ballot this year -- all the Democrats seem to be ahead by comfortable margins, and the propositions are all fairly technical. Nonetheless, she spent time yesterday doing her research, figuring out positions on most of the propositions. She even asked me how to find out information on the various judges up for confirmation if there's not much about them on the web (my confession: I have no idea). She was definitely prepared.
Unfortunately, when she went to vote today, they said they had no record of her registration. Apparently something went wrong on the website back end, and her information never got where it needed to go. They told her that she should have looked for a confirmation email when she registered -- she hadn't received one, but she also hadn't looked for one, because she had thought the confirmation web page was sufficient proof of success. So she wasn't able to vote (not even provisionally, since she has never been on the voter rolls).
Fortunately my daughter's inability to vote will not affect any key races. Fortunately she is politically interested enough not to let this discourage her, and to make sure she is registered for the next election cycle. But how many other first-timers who registered online will show up to the polls on Tuesday to find they aren't registered at all. How many of those 40,000 Georgians? And how many of them will just shrug it off and decide it's just not worth the hassle in the future?
I found this website: canivote.org which could have told us before today that I am registered but my daughter is not. If you know anyone who registered for the first time this election cycle, and they haven't received any kind of confirmation or official election mail, make sure they verify that they are in fact registered before heading to the polls. If they are not, it's too late to do anything this time around, but at least we can make sure they get registered for next time, and avoid the annoyance of showing up to the polls and discovering they can't vote, which could sour the whole experience for them.
