Register to Vote, or Stifle Yourself!

Has it really been 18 years since pop singer Madonna wrapped herself in the U.S. flag and threatened to give us a “spankie” if we didn’t get off our duffs and vote on Election Day?

It’s a good thing that Madonna is now a British resident and not still making ads for the “Rock the Vote” campaign, because otherwise, she’d be beating a lot of people senseless in upcoming weeks.

Yes, election days are cropping up across the United States. In Illinois, ours is set for Feb. 5. Yet if past elections are any indicator, a lot of people are going to sit out the primary election.

In Chicago, city elections officials say there are 1,277,591 residents who are registered to vote. Based on past elections involving presidents, about half of those people will actually go to the polls.

That percentage may go a little higher this time because Chicago’s adopted political son, Barack Obama, is seriously in the running to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee. Let us be generous and say maybe two-thirds of all registered voters in Chicago will show up at polls or go through the process of submitting an absentee ballot.

That could mean the city of Chicago could provide about 800,000 votes toward the Illinois primary. That’s out of a city of nearly 3 million people.

Now I realize that not all of Chicago’s 2.896 million residents are eligible to vote. Roughly 28 percent of the city’s population is underage, while the fact that Chicago has the fifth largest foreign-born population of any U.S. city means there are people who cannot yet legally register.

Yet even so, the fact that Chicago is not likely to crack the 1 million mark in terms of votes generated is sad. I have never understood why more people don’t bother to register to vote. It is so simple.

In my case, I changed my registration when I moved from Springfield to my current Chicago-area address when I updated my driver’s license. An Illinois secretary of state worker was able to take my information for both the license and the voter registration form in one shot.

Voter registration doesn’t incur some arcane process. Trust me when I say that if it were truly complex, then I wouldn’t be able to register myself. I have seen people working voter registration efforts in so many places, including booths set up in libraries and supermarkets.

Just imagine. You could have registered to vote just moments after buying a bunch of bananas at 39 cents a pound, or five 12-pack cases of Coca-Cola for $10.

Yet so many people allow themselves to be intimidated out of the right that their forefathers died for on the battlefield or were beaten for in places like Selma or Birmingham, Ala.

Either that, or they’re just lazy.

The latter is the reason I have always been skeptical of the notion that Chicago’s favorite talk show hostess, Oprah Winfrey, would have any significant impact on the 2008 election.

Oprah likes Barack Obama for president. She may very well get many women across the United States who normally think politics is boring or irrelevant to their lives to take notice of the Democratic presidential primary.

She may even get them to like Barack.

But how many of these people are properly registered to vote. I haven’t heard any significant instruction come from the Oprah camp about informing people of the paperwork they need to submit in order to be able to legally cast a ballot.

How many people turned on to Obama by Oprah will show up at the polling places, only to find out they can’t cast ballots because they have never been registered to vote or because their registration was so old it had lapsed due to neglect.

It reminds me of an episode of the old television sitcom “All in the Family” where Archie Bunker was unable to vote for Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential re-election. Archie was turned away by polling place worker Louise Jefferson because the last time he had bothered to vote was so many years earlier against “that Catholic guy” John Kennedy.

I can easily see voter registration apathy squashing Oprah’s “Vote Obama” campaign.

The reason I’m getting all worked up about voter registration now is because the deadline is approaching. It’s Tuesday.

I’m registered. I’ll be casting a ballot in the Democratic Party’s primary in Illinois, although I’m not yet sure which candidate will get my backing.

As for the rest of you, take some time today or Tuesday and make sure you’re registered to vote. Then, take the time to actually cast a ballot next month.

There’s even a grace period of sorts, by which people can physically show up at the Chicago Board of Elections Commissioners offices in downtown Chicago through Jan. 22 – provided they are willing to cast their ballot instantly upon registering instead of waiting to vote Feb. 5.

You may think it is a waste of time, particularly if your favored candidate does not win. But I always motivate myself to vote by reminding myself that I lose my moral right to complain about my elected officials if I don’t bother to take the time to have a say in their selection.

I may not think much of President Bush at times. I complain about him as much as anyone else who identifies with the Democratic Party.

But if I hadn’t bothered to cast a ballot back in 2000 and 2004, then the Bush camp followers would be totally justified in taking the lead from Archie Bunker in calling me a “dingbat” and telling me to “stifle yourself.”

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s a printable copy of the voter registration form. http://www.elections.il.gov/Downloads/VotingInformation/PDF/R-19.pdf

For those in need of the registration form in Spanish, Polish, Chinese or Korean, click here. http://www.chicagoelections.com/voter_registration_form.htm

Here’s a county-by-county listing across Illinois of where to send the completed registration form. http://www.elections.state.il.us/ElectionAuthorities/ElecAuthorityList.aspx