Today is election day for some of you. Depending on where you live there are various elections for local and state officials including a whole crap-ton of school board officials and city councilfolk.
Even if you didn’t know about it, there is still time to vote today in your local elections. And it is vital you do so. Not only do the impacts of these far-less publicized elections fan out beyond tiny town halls, but failure to participate in the voting process too often could result in you losing the chance. Temporarily at least.
From Tulsa World:
Oklahoma is one of seven states that allow election officials to remove names from the state’s voter registration list if they haven’t voted in several election cycles and don’t respond to address confirmation mailings.
That process, which is done every two years in Oklahoma, will begin this April.
If it’s like the last voter purge in 2017, a sizable portion of the state’s nearly 2.2 million registered voters will come off the rolls.
A list obtained by Oklahoma Watch from the state Election Board shows that 291,233 names were deleted since 2017. Of that amount, more than half were deleted due to inactivity. The purge of inactive voters occurs in April in every odd year.
I’m sure if I were to look hard enough (or at all) there is some politico with a super good explanation as to why we do this, but truth be told, it doesn’t matter. Ultimately this isn’t just cleaning up the paperwork. It is leaving folks out of the electoral process.
If you have not participated in an election in a while and suddenly feel the urge to exercise your civic duty, you may show up to your polling place to find your voice, however little used, silenced. Now this is simple enough to remedy; just register again. But you’ll still miss out casting your ballot for the issue that brought you to the polls to begin with. This is pretty much the dictionary definition of voter disenfranchisement.
The solution to this one is pretty simple though. Just go fucking vote. For the hundred thousand millionth time, vote. Vote often. On everything. Always. Every goddamn time. Use your voice and exercise your rights. Employ whatever cliché motivational poster catchphrase you need to drag your ass out to the ballot scantron machine. Then they can’t remove you from the rolls for inactivity. We could change the law, sure. Or we could, through our own action, render it totally flaccid and defunct.
Need a ride to the polls? Covered.
