Tricky Rules on Primary Voter Registration

Voter registration has played a minor role in KFTC's Voter Empowerment workplan so far in 2008, partially because of awkwardness of primary voter registration rules in Kentucky.

I know some of you will be registering voters over the next 2 weeks, so I wanted to write a quick memo to let you know about potential hazards of registration this season.

This gets complicated, so read carefully.
 
The deadline to register to vote for the Kentucky Primary Election is Monday, April 21st. People who have never registered in Kentucky before (even if they were previously registered in another state) can register normally up to and including on that date and they can pick any party and vote in that party's Primary.

On the other hand, people who are currently registered in Kentucky cannot change their party affiliation (since the deadline in December of last year).

If, for example, someone was registered as a Kentucky Republican last year and turned in a voter registration card tomorrow and marked Democrat (perhaps wanting to have an impact on the big presidential primary), not only would they Not be allowed to vote in the Democratic primary, but they also would Not be allowed to vote in the Republican primary. They'd only be allowed to cast a vote in the handful of non-partisan races throughout the state.

This is especially complicated because so much of our voter registration work is with transient communities and people who are updating their addresses. If they don't know what party they're in now and they "guess" wrong on the voter registration card, they'll lose the right to vote in any partisan primaries.

There's a website people can visit to find out whether or not they're registered in Kentucky and what party they're registered as. It's helpful, but not all that efficient to have at community tabling events, etc. https://cdcbp.ky.gov/VICWeb/index.jsp

Members and organizers should try to make people aware of these issues before people fill out the cards, but we should also use the above website to check people's voter registrations after events but before we turn them in.  In cases that people list a different party affiliation than they presently hold, we should call those people before we turn in the cards and give them a chance to change things.

There's a lot of groups out there registering voters in Kentucky right now, and I fear that some of them are doing it in such a way that disenfranchises more people than it empowers... Let's be careful not be one of those groups.

Call or email me if you have questions.