Auros ([info]auros) wrote,
@ 2008-01-14 12:48:00
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Attention CA absentee voters registered "non-partisan" / "decline to state"!
Californians with friends who might be registered non-partisan, please consider forwarding this public service announcement.

By default you will receive only the Non-Partisan ballot. If you wish to vote in the Democratic Primary, you will need to take your ballot and its envelope to your precinct (the location is printed on the back of your sample ballot), surrender the ballot and envelope, and request to vote Democratic at the precinct.

If you want to avoid this problem in future, the best thing you can do is just register as a Dem. The Republicans exclude independents from their primary anyhow -- the only parties that allow participation are the Dems and the "American Independent Party" (which sucks in a lot of people who think they're registering as "independents", and then find that since they're actually registered with a party, they can't vote in the Dem primary, which allows Dems and actual independents).

It's actually not too late to re-register Dem -- the deadline is 1/22 -- but in order to actually get the Dem ballot, if you already have an absentee ballot, you'd have to go do your re-registration at the Registrar's office (for Santa Clara County, that's in San Jose) and surrender your current ballot and envelope; then you can just fill out your ballot there before you leave. I'm not sure whether they'll let you take a new ballot home with you.

If you insist on remaining registered Non-Partisan, you can get the Dem ballot for future primaries by going to your County Registrar's site before each primary election, and finding the form equivalent to the ones listed here. Check out the form behind the "English" link and note the box on the right side for "Voters not affiliated with a qualified political party". I would recommend mailing this form in at least six weeks before the election; I believe it has to have been processed by 30 days before the election, because absentee ballots start getting mailed out 29 days before the election.


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[info]kimuchi
2008-01-14 09:48 pm UTC (link)
On my voting packet there was also an option to request a democratic (or American Independent) absentee ballot while retaining NP status...I think that only works for people who are not previously set up as permanent absentees, though.

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[info]auros
2008-01-15 01:24 am UTC (link)
Yeah, if you're requesting an absentee for just the current election, they have that. The form I pointed to is the one to request an absentee ballot for the current election; if you're permanent absentee, you can use it to select a party ballot. But there's apparently no way to register permanently as "N-P voting Dem when available".

Edited at 2008-01-15 01:24 am UTC

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[info]elissali
2008-01-15 10:23 pm UTC (link)
First of all, thank you for the info!

hmm... I don't actually have my ballot yet, just my voter registration card. If I re-register Democratic, do I still have time to vote by mail?

Apparently some people got a form that you could check a box saying if you were non-partisan, you could vote in the Democratic primary, but I never got one. I'm not a permanent vote-by-mail voter, either.

if I show up at my polling place on election day, can I decide to vote in whatever I want to at that point? or must I have registered a particular way? If I can, then I think I'll just go vote in person, though I prefer to vote by mail.

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[info]auros
2008-01-15 10:31 pm UTC (link)
If I re-register Democratic, do I still have time to vote by mail?

In theory. See here:
Last day to register to vote in the February 5, 2008, Presidential Primary Election: January 22, 2008
Last day to request a Vote by Mail Ballot by mail: January 29, 2008

I'm pretty sure those dates are state-mandated, so they shouldn't vary from county to county. Regarding the form to request an "N-P voting as..." ballot, you can pull it off the website for your registrar, in all likelihood. (Are you Alameda County? If so, here's the page you want. Check out the form for the Feb 5th election.)

If you are registered absentee, and appear at your precinct with your absentee ballot and envelope in hand, you can just vote regularly. If you do not have your ballot and envelope, you have to vote "provisionally", which means you fill out a form, and they stick the ballot and the form together in an envelope. The registrar then processes the form, checking whether you mailed in a ballot; if not, then they toss your provisional ballot into the stack with all the others, and count it.

Edited at 2008-01-15 10:39 pm UTC

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[info]elissali
2008-01-15 11:37 pm UTC (link)
I am apparently dumb. Well, maybe not dumb, but unobservant. There is a spot on the card I got in the mail where I can request the ballot for the democrats or independents. And I waited on hold with the contra costa county elections office for a while to learn that, too. Well, at least they knew what to point me to!

And thank you for all the information. It's much appreciated!

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By the way, in San Mateo county, at least
[info]trinsf
2008-01-29 09:36 pm UTC (link)
When you're voting DTS/NP-Dem, you're actually not voting Democratic, you're voting DTS/NP-Dem. There are separate ballots and separate accounting is kept. Of course, the vote still counts just the same as any other Dem primary ballot, but from a geeky technical standpoint, you still don't get the same ballot as a registered Democrat.

Additionally, we have also been instructed that rather than asking which ballot DTS/NP voters want, we should give them the NP ballot. (Practically speaking, this means for most voters of this kind that they will be given an eSlate code for NP, initially.) Of course, if a voter is unhappy with that, we will certainly void that ballot/code and give them a DTS/NP-Dem one instead -- but it's easier to just ask for it up front rather than go through that. (The reason we're not theoretically not asking each DTS/NP voter is that other voters hear that and then want to know why *they* weren't given a choice.)

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