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MissCake -> RE: Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American (8/8/2012 10:07:24 AM)
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FR
Having been an activist and assisted in voter registration at activist events, I will say we were rather careful to explicitly state that people of ANY political persuasion were invited to vote, that we supported, most of all, the democratic process in the US, and when we were approached about voter registration, we took off our activist hats for a moment and simply did what the county registrar asked of us. I can't speak for other activists who registered voters, just us.
When I myself registered to vote it was at a table in front of a grocery store set up by some activist or party of some sort. Can't even recall whom, because it was not important. Though we now have Motor-Voter in California which makes it easier to register, through most of my life, it was ONLY by seeing an activist in the field that one could easily register to vote, unless one wanted to look up, in a phone book, the Registrar's number, call, wait on hold, ask for a form to be mailed, mail it back, or go down in person. Not saying that made it impossible but certainly a lot less likely to encourage voting by people of limited means.
So can the poor figure out how to register? Yeah, probably. But I wasn't even poor in those days and it would have been hard for me with the transportation and time I had available as a car-less full-time student and part-time worker. Ever more difficult if English was not my first language, I'd had a lifetime of underfunded schools so my reading skills were worse and had no civics curriculum, had no access to timely transportation AND had people actively discouraging me from voting. You stack the cards against someone, eventually they will fold. We forget the many conveniences prosperity affords us, and how with none of those conveniences, seemingly normal, simple things are made nearly impossible.
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