Election 2004: Vote Early and OftenVoter Registration -- Cheap, Fast...
Friday, October 15, 2004, 10:43 PM
I went down to the Alameda County courthouse today to change my voter registration, so that I'd be able to vote in Oakland, where I now live, instead of in Alameda, where I moved to by crap shoot when I left Montreal.
In the software industry we have a saying: cheap, fast, or good, choose two. That is, you can have a piece of software developed cheap and fast, or fast and good, or good and cheap, but not all three.
So back to the voter registration. It was fast: 5 minutes, and 4 of those minutes were me waiting for the woman at the window to dig up the little voter guide and sample ballot booklets. It was cheap, in fact, free to me. So was it good? Or will I wind up at the polling place being given one of those provisional ballots which are discarded about 95% of the time, or which only list the statewide and national races, as they do in a number of places?
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