One of the stories that got me thinking about a voter registration theme on Feministe was told to me by a friend from work. We were chatting about the election as we closed down for the night and she told me her grandparents voted Republican their entire adult lives. This surprised me because of the tradition of progressive community works that have been passed down in her family for generations.
As she told it, her parents and grandparents were community activists who, through the 70’s and early 80’s, did a lot of voter registration activism in the projects of Chicago. As an election official and resident of now-infamous Cabrini Green, her grandfather encouraged all the minority residents to flex their civil rights and vote for the local and state representatives that would make a difference in their community.
By this point the majority of residents in Cabrini Green were black and almost none of them would consider voting for a conservative ticket, which led to a particular conundrum for her grandfather — their district had to meet a minimum number of two votes for Republicans and Democrats alike to be legitimate. Thus every election day, he and his wife sucked it up and both voted a straight Republican ballot. Sometimes their votes were the only two Republican votes on the ballot count in their district.
GET OUT THE VOTE
Feministe is soliciting stories about your voting experiences to help encourage registered and unregistered voters to vote.
IF YOU HAVE A STORY YOU’D LIKE TO SHARE please email fauxrealtho at gmail dot com and include your name and a link to your website.
You still have at least through early October to get registered to vote in the 2008 presidential election. Some states allow voters to register through the end of October. You can find out your state’s registration deadline here, get information about voting from abroad, and get an absentee ballot.
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This story reminds me of my parents, a pair of die-hard liberal Democrats who live in a district where, for all practical purposes, elections are decided in the Republican primaries. My mom refuses to register as a Republican; my dad, who is a bit more of a pragmatist, figures he might as well grab the chance to swing the vote toward a lesser evil. When all the Republican candidates for a given office are equally awful, he–being romantic as well as pragmatic–writes in my mom.
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