David Rodeback's Blog

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Counting Voters Brought a Pleasant Surprise

I'm slicing and dicing a database of registered voters in American Fork for Heidi Rodeback's city council campaign. (Vote early, vote often! No, wait, this isn't Chicago . . . Just vote. Twice: once in the primary on October 4, and once in the general election on November 8.)

I believe that the two biggest, long-term domestic political issues in the United States are immigration and the purity of the voting process. Good sense on both counts is currently severely compromised; this is news to no one. And the two are closely related.

So in my slicing and dicing, I decided to isolate the registered voters who live in my LDS ward, because they're the ones I know best, and count how many are registered but are no longer around, having either moved (it's a very transient area) or passed away. The answer is almost exactly one out of seven, a shade under 15 percent. There are probably a few more I don't know.

Maybe one in seven sounds awful to you, but to me, in my neighborhood, it is actually surprisingly good. There are a few who left us (one way or another) quite a while ago, but most of the one-seventh have left relatively recently, so it's perfectly understandable that the voter rolls haven't caught up yet.

I'm surprised. I'm even a little impressed. The County Clerk's office is doing a pretty good job on this one.

Comment on this entry
(Readable, relevant, civilized, substantive responses will be posted, regardless of position.)

Copyright 2005 by David Rodeback.
All rights reserved.
Permission is given to publish this article elsewhere on the Web or via e-mail only under these conditions: The article is published intact and unchanged, and is properly credited to the author; and a visible link is included to the article's page at LocalCommentary.com.