if there are regions without mail in ballots i guess its an acceptable excuse, but i doubt being at a college puts you too far from a polling place to just go anyways, so the person cappy is talking about is probably just a lazy starfish
Long-ass story about voter suppression below. Skip to the last two paragraphs if you want.
When I was voting in Georgia (which was arguably a worse idea than voting in Arizona, but ultimately inconsequential), I faced varying degrees of bureaucratic gridlock bullstuff along literally every step in the process. Starting from the beginning, I print out the voter registration form. It requires your SSID, a proof of residence, and a photo ID, regardless of the fact that possessing the first and third thing makes the second entirely obsolete, and a photo ID is the only thing they ask for at the polls.
So to do that, I get a proof of residence from my school. This itself takes like a week to do, and I have to go stand around in an office on the other side of campus to get it done. I photocopy my passport (because I don't drive, but that's admittedly my own fault, not the system's), and then mail the entire thing in a package to the county recorder's office.
Literally a month passes by and there is absolutely no indication that my form has been received, lost in the mail, rejected, or anything. I call up the county recorder's office, and they say that it'll
probably show up online in a week. At this point, it is two weeks until the registration deadline. My registration shows up around five days til deadline, and low-and-behold, it is INCOMPLETE because I 'lacked a photo ID' even though my passport was photocopied in color and mailed along with the registration form.
I call them up again, tell them that they forgeted up with my photo ID, and the woman on the phone promises that they'll rectify it. Three days later, my registration is listed as complete.
Fast-forward to election day, and I go up to the registration table and the guy tells me that they can't find my registration. They go send me to the table for people with 'other complications' and the lady is telling me that despite having my SSID on her computer, she can't find my registration to vote. She starts telling me that I might have to vote provisionally (which is code for voting, but not having it counted), and it's only when I pull out my phone, open the county recorder's website, and show her both my registration page /and/ ID, that she lets me go through. In total, voting took me somewhere between 2-3 hours at a time when most people are expected to show up for work.
The reason I'm telling this story is because if I was working minimum-wage for ten hours a day and raising kids, I would not have had the time to wade through this entire miserable quagmire of bullstuff. My ability to successfully vote was because I'm in school, have free time and disposable income, and care a lot about politics.
So yeah, some people don't vote out of laziness or uninformed apathy. But anyone who says that we shouldn't make voting day a national holiday and ease up the registration process is an starfish. Anyone who is against that because they know it could potentially boost Democratic turnout is a malicious, corrupt starfish.
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