This is the week where citizens are excluded.
This is the week where the American electorate begins to shrink.
This is the week where deadlines to register to vote start to kick in. And these deadlines that lock citizens out of elections for the administrative convenience of government bureaucrats have got to go.
Each state sets its own voter registration deadline. Rock the Vote has a good list of them. Several of the big ones hit this week: Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Seven states, however, decide to expand the electorate and allow citizens to register to vote on election day. Those seven are Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. North Dakota doesn't even bother with voter registration. Since it's a felony to impersonate another person, that's all the deterrent that state needs to prevent voter fraud. And really, that's all any state needs.
So in eight states, more people vote, because the government doesn't make it unnecessarily difficult for citizens to pick who should run the government. In the rest of them, fewer people vote, particularly younger and more mobile people who often don't re-register with some obscure government agency every single time they move to a new address.
In 2009, we need to abolish these deadlines by implementing same-day voter registration for all federal elections. Senators Feingold and Klobuchar with Representative Ellison (D-MN) have filed legislation to do that. Your state legislators can fix your state registration deadline (in Illinois, we created a grace period of 14 more days after this week's deadline where citizens can register to vote if they do so in person at the office of the election administrator as a compromise step).
For some great material on same-day voter registration, check out Demos.
Call your legislators, state and federal, on Monday and tell them to abolish these archaic voter registration deadlines.