A Right, a Duty, a Privilege and a Chore

My roommate keeps a list of reasons of why I am not a normal person. I suspect all roommates keep similar records of each other's behavior. If not literally, they at least mentally write down things to tell the court just in case they lose it and go after said roommate with a machete.

Jeanne further associates several of my behavioral quirks as being peculiar to Seattlites. These include the obvious ones: whining about bad coffee, profound distrust of the sun and general contempt for everything east of the Rockies. But chief among my eccentricities is one that, as far as I know, has no direct cultural link to growing up in a place where the skies are cloudy all day--the way I vote.

Every fall I get my Washington State Voter's Pamphlet in the mail and study it carefully. I buy the ludicrously priced copies of The Seattle Times that make it to Out of Town News three days late. Registering to vote absentee is sort of like checking that box off when you take the PSAT; suddenly you're on everyone's mailing list. But I actually read all the campaign literature I receive in the mail. I take notes and write in the margins of the pamphlets. I call my mom, my dad, my sister and all the high school friends to whom I'm still speaking.

Then I vote. Like all absentee voters, my annual foray into the democratic process is somewhat lacking in excitement. Some people get to go into booths, close the curtain and pull levers. I sit on my couch and poke a paper clip through a piece of paper. But that's not what Jeanne thinks is weird. What she finds amazing is the number of dots I poke.

"You actually vote on initiatives?!" she said, watching me dither over term limits last year. She also thinks it funny that I call my mom (a lawyer) for opinions on judge candidates, and that I know the name of my representative on the county council.

My roommate isn't the only person who thinks it's unnatural that I keep a careful watch on political events 3,000 miles away. The nature of absentee voting and the laws governing it indicate a similar distrust on the part of the state and federal governments. And although many states have made registering to vote substantially easier by instituting "motor-voter" laws that allow voter registration at driver licensing centers, no similar relaxation has occurred with regard to absentee voting.

In Washington State, for example, voters must submit their petitions for absentee ballots for every separate election, be it primary or final, or even the random school levies that occur in January. Since such petitions are not accepted for more than a certain window ahead of time, one can't simply mail every card at the beginning of the year. And while senior citizens and disabled Americans may now register as permanent absentees in many states, there is no recognition of such a common absence as college.

But Washington is relatively lax compared to other states. At least I can mail my ballot myself, anytime until election day. A friend from Memphis had to have her ballot signed by someone in the post office before she could mail it off. And on the one occasion that my roommate filed for an absentee ballot (a friend of the family was running for a local position) she discovered at the last minute that it actually had to be received by election day. This led to a complicated maneuver in which Jeanne's brother hand-delivered a Federal Express package to the airport where it was whisked away to North Carolina to be met at the airport by another relative.

All this effort just to do something that a majority of Americans won't walk three blocks to do.

I don't think that there is a great conspiracy out there trying to prevent college students from voting. Or that too many people worry about the implications of voting in a precinct 3,000 miles from where you live. (There are some valid issues surrounding this but I doubt they are upmost in the regulator's mind.) It's just that we haven't caught up to our own technology.

Bankcards allow us to get instant access to accounts across the world. You can now fax a photo from Boston to Brazil in less than a minute. Internet travels mysteriously across all borders. And yet, in many states, ballots are still counted by hand.

A cynic would argue that this is proof that money is more important than democracy; an idealist that we simply value voting too much to let it denigrate into another keyboard command on the computer; a realist would say Americans are simply technological morons.

I wouldn't necessarily argue that voting booths be done away with and that church basements be replaced by Compuserve. But for those of us who are 3,000 miles away, automatic absentee ballots seem the least that technology can do for me. In the meantime, I'll poke a paperclip through some paper and hunt for a stamp.