Today, I showed up at my usual polling place.  Same place I have voted in every election for the last seven years.  And when I mean every election, I mean every election.  As a former campaign manager, one of the first things we did to our opponents was to look them up and see how often they voted – if they never did, that was a good talking point against them.  So I was determined never to let that happen to me – I even voted in the September primary, when there was absolutely nothing on the ballot.

So imagine my surprise when I got to the table, only to find out my name was missing from the voter list.  I had been deleted.  And I admit, I was more than a little irritated.  The poor official there tried to explain to me how my name could go missing, but I wasn\’t getting any good answers.  But I had to go over to the new registrant table and re-register, as if I had never voted before.  So, along with my name, I am certain my voter history data is gone, too.  All those years of voting, wiped away.

Now, I don\’t know how this could have happened, or who is to blame.  But I have no problem putting it on the imbeciles at the Government Accountability Board, who have demonstrated their ineptitude at managing voter lists in a spectacular way.  Whatever list they set up for cross-checking municipal voter lists managed to weed out someone who has voted in every election from the same address for seven years.  So congrats to them.  As a taxpayer, I\’ve paid $22 million for them to remove me and all my data from the rolls.

As it turns out, re-registering ended up not being that big of a deal.  But I don\’t know when our state is going to wake up and realize that when it comes to voter lists, we\’re essentially a banana republic.