How to Check Your Voter Registration

Tuesday, May 5 is primary election day in Indiana.

And, while candidates and their campaign teams are painfully aware of how soon that is and how little time they have left to get their message out, a substantial majority of potential voters have not yet started to think about it.

Meanwhile, there are important deadlines coming up, even in the next few days.  

The first is this Monday, April 6, which is the deadline for registering to vote (or confirming that your voter registration is current).  Now, most people who are civically engaged enough to be reading a newsletter or blog like this are probably comfortable that they are safely registered.

Don’t be.

Why You Need to Check Your Voter Registration

If you voted in the last election, and haven’t moved since, your voter registration should be fine. (Although, here is an actionable item for this week – if you have friends or family members who have moved since the last election, please reach out to them with a reminder to update their registration!)

Beyond that, it is really worth taking a minute or two to confirm that your voter registration has not been accidentally (or nefariously) cancelled. Start by checking here: www.indianavoters.com.

Republican Secretaries of State and election officials across America have been purging voter rolls, sometimes indiscriminately, in search of phantom “voter fraud.”

A certain amount of clean-up of voter rolls is appropriate, of course. Every year, millions of Americans move and forget to update their voter registration. Their presence on the voter rolls of their previous location is clutter. It is not evidence of voter fraud. But this fact has long been used by right-wing media, and now by elected officials, to promote hysteria about “millions” of ineligible voters stealing elections.

And so, in many places, we are seeing election officials aggressively purging names from their lists, often removing long-time residents by mistake or because of a technical discrepancy (anyone who goes by their middle name knows how this happens!).  

We have seen a number of friends here in central Indiana report that they have checked, and have found that it had happened to them.  I am one of them. We checked in time, and were glad they did. It can happen to you, and if you don’t check by Monday, it will be too late. You will have been disenfranchised.

Here is another reason to do it: consider it practice, a dress rehearsal, for all of us having to do it in far greater numbers before October.

Whether or not Congress passes the SAVE Act, indiscriminate purging of voter rolls is going to continue. One way to make it problematic for the election officials engaging in it, is through aggressive over-compliance.

Reconfirming is an Act of Resistance

You’ve heard of Indivisible’s One Million Rising initiative? That program has a two-fold purpose:  1) to build numbers in The Resistance, neighborhood by neighborhood, and 2) to educate people in the premises of mass non-cooperation.

Mass non-cooperation goes beyond peaceful demonstrations on public property. It often involves economic action, such as boycotts and strikes. But it can also involve hobbling government over-reach by responding in such numbers that government grinds to a halt.

If every county clerk’s office in America started getting dozens or hundreds of phone calls a day, and lines out the door of citizens just confirming (and re-confirming, and re-confirming, day after day) that their voter registration was still valid, they might start reaching out to their legislators and begging them to stop promoting these “voter fraud” lies and faux remedies.

There isn’t time for this to be a mass action in Indiana before Monday. But YOU can practice it, and be prepared to encourage others to do the same later this summer and fall, before the October registration for the general election.

Instructions for Checking Voter Registration

Again, it is easy enough to check online with the Indiana Secretary of State’s office:  www.indianavoters.com.  It looks like this:

Enter your name, birthdate, and county of residence. If you get a message like I did, fortunately, you will be provided with the address, phone number, and email address of your local election board. (But, don’t settle for sending an email!)

Check today! Check again on Friday and Monday! Tell your friends! Voter suppression can affect anyone.

Next week: Notes on opportunities for – and the importance of – Early Voting, which begins on April 7.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash