If you live in California and have not registered to vote since your last move, please do so today.
Today is the deadline to register to vote in California!
The last day to send in your absentee ballot request is October 26th.
Also, if you registered outside a Safeway or on-the-street and did not mail your registration in personally, please contact your county elections office to verify that you are actually registered to vote. This will help prevent snafus at the polls on November 2nd. Your voter registration information is a public document, and you can call your county clerk directly to find out. Keep your registration receipt when you register. If your registration doesn’t go through, you will need it on election day to force your county to count your vote.
Even if you don’t plan to vote, please register anyway– you might learn in your voter information packet about a local initiative that’s important to you and which isn’t covered in the press. And if you don’t plan to vote because you’d like a “None of the Above” option, consider voting anyway– you can always write-in your candidate, and you can always skip ANY question or office on the ballot without invalidating the rest of your ballot.
Among your voter rights in California, you have the right to cast a provisional ballot on election day. This means that, if you go to the polls and are not on the roster, you can vote with a provisional ballot. In Santa Cruz county, where we use paper ballots, your ballot will be placed in a secrecy envelope that will then be put into a second envelope, where you will write your name and address and sign it. The clerk will write in an explanation for why you are voting provisionally (not on the roster, has moved, etc) and your vote will be placed in a separate envelope. A provisional ballot is not counted on election day. Instead, it will be verified by the county clerk’s office, who will check to make sure you didn’t vote elsewhere in the county that day, and that you are eligible to vote in this election. Your vote will then be counted. You can follow-up on the status of your provisional ballot, and, if it was declined, you may challenge that decision and sue to have it counted.