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Have you noticed that GCC is host
to a number of non-college groups, such as Scientologists promoting
their Personality Tests, Lyndon La Rouche followers promoting their
politics, and various "movie preview" agents offering free tickets?
We are a
public, free speech zone, and our student population attracts numerous
groups with the goal of recruiting to their cause (or cult, as the case
may be).
We also try to be a civic opportunity zone, and encourage students and
employees to register to vote during certain political seasons. Like all
community colleges, GCC has the obligation to offer voter registration
information when students enroll. Sometimes, we also have voter
registration activities on campus, and the question becomes: Can we
trust those who offer us this opportunity?
On the positive side, the League of Women Voters, an immensely credible
non-partisan organization, worked with our faculty and students to host
a table this past September and October. The Guild coordinated the
efforts and our own GCC folks were joined by some Occidental College
students doing their community-based learning.
This voter registration effort was truly nonpartisan and entirely
appropriate. We registered over 500 individuals, some for the first
time and others due to change in address, name, or party. It is pretty
demanding work, with lots of rejections. Some volunteers reported that
a few students laughed when asked to register, because the idea of
voting was so ridiculous. Sad, but true. We political science faculty
have our work cut out for us!
But contrast this nonpartisan, legitimate effort with the extremely
distressing experience of one of our faculty who re-registered on campus
last spring due to a change in address, and then found out much later
that her form had not been mailed in by the "volunteers" who signed her
up. Too bad she didn't realize last spring that the California
Republican Party was paying a good sum for Republican registrations,
and, unfortunately, sometimes those hired to do the job just throw away
the forms that are filled out "Democrat" (It may be that those paid by
Democrats also behave in this way, but Democrats pay a lot less per
registration anyhow).
What can we learn? Well, we must encourage our students to register and
vote, so we can't be scaring them with this kind of story. We should
probably tell them that if they have the opportunity to register,
whether on campus or somewhere else, they should take the form, fill it
out, and MAIL IT THEMSELVES.
It's sad to think that a civic opportunity like voter registration can
be abused. We have heard many stories, starting in November 2000 and
repeated again today, about registration forms that never get mailed,
legitimate voters told they are ineligible, ballots that go uncounted,
Diebold machines that record votes but leave no "paper trail" to prove
the election valid. Are we a nation that needs international observers
to determine whether our elections are free and fair?
It's a comedown for the world's so-called finest democracy. We can't
solve all that here at GCC, but we can be cautious about this voter
registration issue as well as the related issues of signing petitions.
It's best not to sign anything that a stranger shoves in your face,
because a one-sentence summary can be highly misleading. Unlike the
"old days," when genuine political concerns drove volunteers to work on
petitions for ballot measures, now 98 percent of the signature gatherers
are paid by special interests to get your "John Hancock" on that
petition.
So, pass the word: politics is a messy world. Protect yourself!
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