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Nearly disenfranchised in Tacoma, WA because of a clerical error
I was nearly turned away because of a clerical error in my voter registration. My husband and I moved to Washington state in August, and immediately we registered to vote. It took nearly three months of
phone calls, re-registering, and error correction on the part of Pierce County, however, to get us registered. We originally requested to vote at the polls, but our first set of registration cards
indicated that we would be voting absentee. I called the county auditor's office to correct the information, and they assured me that the system had been updated and we would receive new cards. The new cards came, but a few days later, absentee ballots arrived in the mail. Again, I called the county auditor to report the error. They told me that the system was correct, that we were to vote at the polls, and that we were to shred the absentee ballots. Today, we showed up at the polls, waited in line for over 90 minutes to vote, but when our turn came we were not allowed to vote because their records showed that we were to vote absentee. They tried to make us fill out provisional ballots, but we refused: we wanted to take zero chances with risking our ballots being rejected. I told them that I had called the county and had been told to vote at the polls. Their answer: "Well, that just means that you could vote at the polls with
provisional ballots." Nobody ever told us that bit of information! I'm not sure if that answer was true or not. So we asked if we could still mail in the absentee ballots, which we hadn't gotten around to
shredding yet. They said yes, as long as they were postmarked today. So in the end, we were able to vote, but the fact that registration and voting was so difficult and fraught with misinformation and
incompetence is appalling.
Posted:
Nov 4 2008, 7:17 PM EST by
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