David Kanter | Offering an online option

As I awkwardly balanced the clipboard on my knee, I scribbled my information onto a voter registration form. While I walked away from the Obama campaign worker who assured me that my registration was now all set, I commented to my friend that the whole voter registration system seemed remarkably inefficient. For some reason, I had a bad feeling that my chicken-scratched name wasn't going to make it onto a list of registered voters come election day.

Fast forward one month later: A campaign volunteer for Obama sent me a message via Facebook telling me that my registration form was missing "some crucial information." For some reason the Campaign for Change needed my Rodin room number in order to complete my registration.

When I called the campaign office, the staff couldn't locate my registration form. When I called the appropriate city office that handles voter registration, they told me that they hadn't received my form. Somewhere along the line my first registration form got lost in the shuffle. To make a long story short, the next day I had to re-register with the hope that all would go smoothly the second time around.

It would be okay if this were just an isolated incident. But it's not.

College sophomore Ariel Fisher, who also registered to vote on Locust Walk, received an eerily similar message via Facebook. The message informed him that his form was missing his mailbox number. This past Monday - the last day to register - Ariel re-registered.

Ariel and I are lucky that Obama's devoted campaign workers were able to comb over our forms for disqualifying omissions before it was too late. Just think of all the others that don't have an extra set of eyes to examine their forms. And consider all the forms that inevitably get misplaced.

Every election cycle, this problem rears its ugly head. Chances are you probably know someone who went to vote on election day only to find out that he or she wasn't registered to vote. All it takes is a misplaced form, a box left unchecked or a smeared social security number.

Since the current pen-and-paper registration system fails us all too often, we need to get behind a serious effort to make online voter registration an option in Pennsylvania.

Just think for a moment of all the complex tasks that we complete on a daily basis over the Internet. We add and drop courses, buy textbooks, talk to friends and pay bills all with a few simple mouse clicks. You can't tell me the technology isn't there to get people registered to vote online.

With an online system you'd essentially cut out all the intermediaries. Campaign workers, mailmen and city workers would no longer have to physically handle your form. Also, with an online system, smudged and illegible writing wouldn't be a problem.

Once you've submitted the online registration form, the computer program could automatically highlight any missing or incomplete information that would prevent your form from being processed properly.

Some might argue that technical difficulties - say, a crash in the system - could hamper online registration. That's certainly true. But then again, technical difficulties can hamper any online process. If we trust the Internet to transmit our personal banking data, why can't we trust it to transmit our registration forms? If worse came to worse and the entire online system failed, we could simply revert back to pen and paper.

If we transitioned to an online system, we'd still keep paper registration as an option for those who don't have computer access. AJ Schiera, director of Penn Leads the Vote, pointed out to me that using an online-only system would disenfranchise some voters.

But this Nov. 4, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope that our forms got processed correctly. I guess it wouldn't be an American election if we didn't choose to do things the hard way.

David Kanter is a College sophomore from East Falmouth, Mass. His e-mail is kanter@dailypennsylvanian.com. David vs. Goliath appears on Wednesdays.

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