VOTER REGISTRATION EVENTS SHOULD BE YEAR ROUND! Typically voter registration ramps up a few months before elections and then disappears until the next election. This is short-sighted and misses an enormous opportunity because:
- Kids turn 18 throughout the year and need to register. For example, more than 20,000 young people turned 18 in Georgia between the November 2020 elections and the January 2021 runoff election. Their votes made a difference.
- People become US citizens year round and can register to vote. In 2020, despite pandemic-related closures and slow-downs, more than 625,000 people became naturalized US citizens eligible to vote. The number was typically higher before the pandemic.
- People move house every year and need to re-register to vote. Failure to re-register after a move is the single biggest reason preventing people from voting. More than 40 million Americans move every year.
- Many people have never registered to vote. About 27 percent of eligible Americans—63 million people—had not registered to vote in the 2020 elections. An earlier Pew study found the biggest reason given for not registering was that people were never asked to register to vote.
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If you’re interested in working on voter registration, please comment.
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A friend sent me this photo from New York last week, and I got all enthusiastic in our exchange about it.
Me: This is fabulous! Where is it? What theatre? What event? I love it!
My friend: Broadway. I stumbled into David Byrne’s American Utopia, which was basically a rock concert from this singer from Talking Heads. He turns out to have a definite political consciousness. His show included an appeal to vote as well as ear-splitting noisy rock 'n' roll.