Are You Registered To Vote?

And have all of you living in places other than your usual district requested your absentee ballots? Many states' deadlines for voter registration are Monday. If you still need to register, there are a gajillion websites that can either do it for you or point you to the forms to do it by mail. Off the top of my head, for example:

www.rockthevote.com
www.declareyourself.com

And if your state hasn't gotten with the times and, like OHIO, doesn't allow you to register to vote online, take a moment to ask your elected officials to make a change to that policy.

There was an interesting segment on NPR this week about local voting rights for college students. http://www.npr.org/templates/story.php?storyId=4052263 I personally never understood why this wasn't already the policy. College students are almost without exception of voting age. Few of them are felons. What logical reason could there be from preventing them from voting in the district where they spend the overwhelming majority of the year (if not the entire year)? They are affected by decisions made on a local level, so why shouldn't they have a say in those decisions and in the election of those who make the decisions? In many cases, they are also tax payers in that district. This is another change that I would like to see made to election law/policy in the US.

And let's not even get started about the Electoral College.

Anyway, don't take your privilege (and no, it's not a right-- SCOTUS sez so) to vote for granted. Get registered, get informed, and make your voice heard on Election Day. A single drop of water may seem insignificant, but lots of drops of water formed the Grand Canyon.