Voting

I have lived in Oklahoma most of my life and therefore never thought much of the rules revolving around voting until recently. You see, until moving away, it never occured to me that other states had different rules and regulations regarding voting. I guess I just always thought that voting was something regulated by the national government.

However, a few years ago, Clay and I moved to Montana and discovered that in MT, you could register to vote on the day of an election, which is very different from Oklahoma's laws which stop voter registration 24 days prior to an election. I have to admit that although I had made sure to register long before the elections, it was very liberating to find out that they encouraged people to register even on election day.

But the full impact of Oklahoma's voting laws did not hit me until we moved back to OK. Now that we are back, I have discovered how sketchy OK is about voting. In Montana, voting is advertised and encouraged in every way. Mailings are sent out to remind people to vote and to give information about candidates. In Oklahoma, voting has the feeling of an event attended by invitation only. It seems as if voting in OK is designed for the elite, the organized, and the elderly which in general would exclude most of the younger, more liberal, college population as well as those of us that are unable to spend all of our time tracking elections.

Now, I'm not trying to make excuses for my irresponsible actions. I understand that I should have registered to vote as soon as I moved back to Oklahoma so that something like this wouldn't happen. Nevertheless, voting in a democracy should not be designed to exclude a certain group of people. All people are created equal and should therefore share the right of expressing their opinions in democratic elections.