United, Yes. Uniform? Not Even Close.
Nov. 6th, 2008 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluPart of the reason that voter registration deadlines were on my mind in the previous post is that moving from California to Washington can be a bit of a gotcha, voter registration wise, if you aren't prompt about getting your paperwork done.
California's voter registration deadline is 15 days before the election. In Washington, the deadline is 30 days (unless you deliver your registration materials by hand to the local voter registration office, in which case it's 15). I've gotten caught by that at least once.
My sense was that Washington wasn't that rare, so I went poking around this site to see if I was right. Yep. Well over half the states have registration deadlines 25-30 days out from a given election. Or possibly more, depending on when a special election is called in Georgia. Then they range all the way down to places like Connecticut, which requires you to register one day before the election, to places like Minnesota, and New Hampshire, where you can register at the polls, on the day.
What's impressive, too, is abstruse wording of some of the deadlines. Iowa, Georgia, and Nebraska win the prize for what seems to me like pointless complication. As far as I can tell, for any Tuesday election, the (for example) 5th Monday before is always going to be 29 days before the election, so why not say that? But the one that really got my jaw hanging was North Dakota: North Dakota does not have voter registration. They have ballots and polling places, and it appears that they vote, so I have no idea how that works. I guess you just show up.
So while we are the United States of America, there sure isn't a lot of uniformity of election process among or across them.
California's voter registration deadline is 15 days before the election. In Washington, the deadline is 30 days (unless you deliver your registration materials by hand to the local voter registration office, in which case it's 15). I've gotten caught by that at least once.
My sense was that Washington wasn't that rare, so I went poking around this site to see if I was right. Yep. Well over half the states have registration deadlines 25-30 days out from a given election. Or possibly more, depending on when a special election is called in Georgia. Then they range all the way down to places like Connecticut, which requires you to register one day before the election, to places like Minnesota, and New Hampshire, where you can register at the polls, on the day.
What's impressive, too, is abstruse wording of some of the deadlines. Iowa, Georgia, and Nebraska win the prize for what seems to me like pointless complication. As far as I can tell, for any Tuesday election, the (for example) 5th Monday before is always going to be 29 days before the election, so why not say that? But the one that really got my jaw hanging was North Dakota: North Dakota does not have voter registration. They have ballots and polling places, and it appears that they vote, so I have no idea how that works. I guess you just show up.
So while we are the United States of America, there sure isn't a lot of uniformity of election process among or across them.
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