Deliver Your Voter Registration Form in Person

Feeling lucky? Go ahead and mail your voter registration form into the county. They'll probably get it.

But they don't have to process it.

That's one of the nasty little changes tucked deep in the budget (and unearthed by the investigative reporting outfit California Watch).

In order to save $33 million, the state no longer provided money to reimburse county registrars for a variety of things they do, including the processing of voter registration forms that arrive in the mail.

When that money was cut, the state mandate that the counties take care of such things were suspended. 

Other things the counties don't have to do: send an absentee ballot to anyone who wants one.

Counties can still provide these services, and state officials are urging them to do so. But they don't have to.

By the way, this bit of budget news offers another reason why California needs to establish on-line voter registration -- and pronto. (It's currently illegal to register on the Internet).

Efforts to establish a system to do that have been set back and delayed for years.

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