Sohn: Beat the clock, register to vote online before Monday's primary election deadline

Associated Press file photo/Reflection of a 2016 voter. Monday is the voter registration deadline in Tennessee for the March 3 presidential primary election.
Associated Press file photo/Reflection of a 2016 voter. Monday is the voter registration deadline in Tennessee for the March 3 presidential primary election.

Are you fed up with the president's lawyers paving the way for a Trump monarchy? Did your stomach churn when you heard Republican lawyers say that even if President Donald Trump did extort a foreign government to find phony evidence of dirt on one of Trump's political opponents it's OK - because his re-election is "in the public interest"?

Or perhaps you're tired of the reverse arguments from Democrats? Maybe you are sick of Senate and Congress members making rules and laws that only help them?

Well then, you'd better make sure you're registered to vote. And you'd better hurry because Monday is Tennessee's deadline to register in time to cast a ballot in the March 3 primary election.

Yes, Monday.

Even if you think you're registered, double check. If you haven't voted in a while, your name may have been purged from the voter rolls. Even if you know you're registered, dot your i's and cross your t's: Otherwise you may find yourself turned away when you go to your polling place if your name has been changed by marriage or divorce, or if your driver's license name or address no longer match your voter name or address.

Click over to register online or check your registration in Tennessee, Georgia or Alabama:

* In Tennessee, the online address is govotetn.com, or you register in person at your county election commission office during normal business hours.

* Georgia's deadline to register and still vote in Georgia's March 24 primary is Feb. 24, and the online registration address is registertovote.sos.ga.gov

* Alabama's voter registration deadline for its March 3 primary is Feb. 17 and the online address is sos.alabama.gov

In Hamilton County, you can register in person at the Hamilton County Election Commission at 700 River Terminal Road in Chattanooga between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Plenty of states - especially those with GOP majority legislatures or governors - have moved in recent years to make voting registration and voting harder rather than easier.

Last spring, Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett's office pushed a new bill to require groups leading voter registration efforts, think the League of Women Voters and others, to potentially face criminal misdemeanor charges and fines up to $10,000 for submitting too many - 100 or more - incomplete forms. Incomplete as in when a new registrant is reluctant to put his or her Social Security number on a form handed to a stranger.

Hargett said at the time the move was to better police voter registrations.

But isn't policing the validity of our voter registrations the job of election commissions around the state and Hargett's Secretary of State office? Why then would he or any other official want to delegate that policing job to the League or to a church group or to a university or to any other group that helps sign up voters?

Pardon us for being cynical, but we believe the real intention was to keep fewer people voting - especially women, people of color and young voters - all of whom tend to vote Democratic.

It's voter suppression, pure and simple. But this time that suppression was being ratcheted up from would-be voters themselves to the churches, universities, nonprofits, political parties and others signing up those voters. It was - and is - suppression by chilling the help groups and wrongly putting those organizations at risk of criminal misdemeanor charges or fines or both.

The League of Women Voters and other groups sued the state, and a federal judge in September blocked the new law at least through the November general election.

U.S. District Judge Aleta A. Trauger ruled that state officials offered "simply no basis" for the new legislation, which was put on the books just after the Tennessee Black Voter Project registered 86,000 black and brown people to vote in Tennessee.

"That screams racism," said one of the organizers of the black voter project.

In the ruling, Trauger said it was "unrefuted" that the law would have required registration drives to curtail and perhaps even discontinue their activities, harming Tennesseans "who merely wish to exercise their core constitutional rights of participating in the political process by encouraging voter registration."

Marian Ott, who leads the Tennessee chapter of the non-partisan League of Women Voters, and Sharon Alexander, the voter services chairwoman of the League in Chattanooga, said the General Assembly's effort had exactly the opposite effect. It galvanized a surge of new voter advocacy volunteers.

"We've have had an uptick [of voter registration volunteers] actually probably 20 new volunteers this month," Alexander said, noting her group had registered more than 500 new voters in the fall and over the winter has continued the effort by visiting local high schools and Chattanooga State to register first-time voters. They plan to visit two more high schools on Friday and Monday.

Sandy McCrea, with the non-partisan Hamilton County Voter Coalition, also has seen an increase in help - "probably 20 new volunteers this month. That group is offering rides to the polls for the presidential primary and for early voting.

So get registered and set up your ride. In Hamilton County, call 211 or the voter coalition at 423-402-0077.

Change the conversation. Vote.

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