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Homeless face hurdle of confusing voter registration form
A street corner can serve as a home address.
Valerie King fills out a voter registration form during the United Way Community Resource Exchange on Fri., Sept. 12. National Low-Income and Homeless Voter Registration Week begins Sept. 22.
Lloyd Dalton sits at a table in a hallway at Seattle’s Qwest Field stadium, pen poised over a form that he hopes will help him make a difference on Nov. 4.
Dalton, 49, is a Native Alaskan of the Haida people. He has no home of his own and, over the years, he’s tried several times to register to vote by putting a post office box number on the form. But the registrations got rejected, he says, because the state wouldn’t accept a post office box as a residence — an address for living quarters is required.
Prior to the 2000 election, however, “Someone finally knew what I was supposed to do since I didn’t have an actual address,” he says of a man at an agency who helped him fill out the registration form. The instructions were to put the address of a shelter or the place where Dalton was staying on the residence line and put the post office box only on the line for the mailing address.
It seems simple, but homeless advocates say they’ve been surprised by how few King County Elections workers can accurately provide this basic information when asked — one reason the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance and the American Civil Liberties Union staffed the voter registration table where Dalton reregistered last week at an event held by United Way. The Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness is also putting booths around the city starting Sept. 22 as part of National Low-Income and Homeless Voter Registration Week.
With the nation heading into a close presidential election and King County preparing to switch to all-mail voting in February — November’s election will be the last for voting in precincts — coalition director Alison Eisinger says it’s critical that homeless individuals get the right information about how to fill out the form. But last March, she says, as the organization was starting to prepare a brochure on voter registration, red flags went up.
“We made a number of calls to King County Elections and the Washington Secretary of State and got a range of answers,” Eisinger says. That included “some answers that were not correct and not complete and didn’t reflect an agreement that had been put in place by elections officials in conversation with homeless advocates during the 2004 election.”
The agreement arrived at in 2004, she says, was that the county elections division would allow homeless individuals to use the King County Administration Building in downtown Seattle for both their residential and mailing address, making it possible for them to be assigned a precinct and have a place to pick up the voter registration cards and absentee ballots that the county mails out.
But in the wake of 2004’s election debacle, in which misplaced ballots were discovered during hotly contested recounts in the governor’s race between Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi, many personnel and procedures in the elections division have changed. In the chaos, says Rachael Myers, director of the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, the agreement about the administration building went out the window.
“There was nothing formal that got into their polices,” Myers says. “It’s back to where we were before: It depends on who you ask at the county elections office.”
County elections spokesperson Bobbie Egan says some people remain grandfathered in to use her office as their mailing address. But between 2004 and now, the elections division has moved out of the administration building to a new facility in Renton, making it far more difficult, Myers and Eisinger say, for people to get down to Renton and pick up voter cards or ballots.
As a result, the two say, many people trying to assist with or fill in a voter registration form are confused as to what to put on the form for the residential address. The “biggest issue we’ve faced is people thinking they can’t vote because they’re homeless,” says housing alliance staffer Mike Kelly, who helped register about 40 voters last week at the United Way table. “But they can” — something state law now guarantees, he says.
After the election fiasco of 2004, says Brian Zylstra, a spokesperson with the Secretary of State’s office, King County Republicans filed thousands of voter registration challenges, many based on what address voters used. In response, the legislature amended state voting law in 2006 to reflect that “No person registering to vote… shall be disqualified because he or she lacks a traditional residential address.”
A potential voter, however, still has to list something on the line for “residential/physical address,” along with a mailing address. Egan, and a new brochure that SKCCH will start distributing next week, explain what to do:
Residential/Physical Address: For those who do not live in a dwelling, “the law states that a person can register at a place they deem to be their residence — a cross street or a public park,” Egan says. It can also be the address of a shelter where a person stays. A location is necessary, she says, to assign a voter to a precinct polling place.
Mailing Address: The address of a friend or relative can be used or that of a shelter or program that an individual uses, such as the Compass Center or Real Change, with nonprofits generally holding mail two weeks, Eisinger says.
If a person has no shelter or friend’s address to use, the only other option is to put down “General Delivery, Seattle, WA.” Mail is held 30 days, she says, but goes only to one location — the downtown post office at Third Ave. and Union St. — and can only be picked up during limited hours.
At the United Way event, Lloyd Dalton used one address for both lines on the form: the Chief Seattle Club at 410 Second Ave. It’s a place he’s assured of getting his mail without having to reveal where he sleeps at night — a piece of information, Eisinger says, that could put a homeless person at risk.
After not voting in the 2004 election and living to regret the outcome, Dalton says he’s glad he knew what to do to re-register.
“I was disappointed with the last election,” he says, but “I figured this one could be a big change. We’ll see.”
Comments
Perhaps someone can fill me in on the problem with requiring government-issued photographic identification upon voting (aside from the cost and time of getting one) 642-524 exam. Requirements for voting in state and federal elections in the United States require that one be a citizen, and while it’s relatively easy for a single person or small group of people to get a fake ID, it’s not so easy for larger groups to do so without word getting out. There have been worries in a number of California districts about noncitizens voting illegally because there’s really not much checking that occurs on voter registration 642-845 exam. My girlfriend does not have a California ID of any kind for the county registrar to check, and when she registered, she was not challenged for additional information, nor did the polling place request additional proof 642-446 exam. This showed me that it would be trivial to be able to vote in an election whether or not one is legally allowed, which seems a major security flaw in itself.
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