Conspiring ?

11/06/08

There are no doubt a million plus blog entries about the election, and I have no interest in discussing results. I just know thatRobin and I didn't get to vote, and it took a lot of concerted planning and effort to get me in that spot. Everything came together just wrong, and it was quite a chain of events that led to our being unable to participate in the election. Bear with me a bit...

Back in July we began to make firm plans for our move to Florida. This included applying for a residence address, even though we would be mobile in the fifth-wheel. Florida has a lot of people that do this kind of stuff, in RVs and on boats so there is a application procedure that you go through to declare and verify your residence and that you are indeed domiciled in Florida. It involves forms and phone calls and I knew it'd take some time.
We successfuly met the requirements to establish residency and made application to declare Florida as our domicile. We also made application to register to vote in Florida since we figured we'd be there a couple of weeks prior to election day.
The Domicile papers came back approved, but the Voter's Registration came back to us not approved because we'd submitted the wrong version of the form. (We downloaded and printed the form from their website...) OK, so now it's September and I start thinking that this is getting to be tight timing after all. So ... to cover our bases, I applied for mail-in voting in Colorado. The rationale was that even if the paperwork for Florida didn't get back in time we could still vote absentee in Colorado. I would feel really good about that anyway because I was familiar with the ballot (of course, if we're leaving the state I wouldn't really feel right in voting on local issues).

Now, let me explain mail forwarding :) ... we have a physical address in Florida, but we don't actaully park there. We'll be switching RV parks and eventually boat docks relatively frequently and a properly validated mail forwarding address allows us to get our mail anywhere, any time we like. You mail it to our 'street' address and the company forwards it to us wherever we tell them to, either on-the-spot or on scheduled intervals (ours is twice a week). They will screen out junk mail if we ask them to, they will even open our mail and scan it and we can have access to it on line immediately. Great services for folks who travel full time. Not too expensive for what they do and nice when you go to apply for a driver's license :).
So; theoretically you'd mail to our Longmont address, the Post Office forwards it on our forwarding order to the 'residence' address here in FL and the mail forwarding service sends it to our RV or boat location, wherever that is. Sure there'll be some delay, but oh well.

Well, the voter's registration cards from Florda arrived a couple of days before we left on the trip, but we still did not have our mail-in ballots from Colorado, and it was time to put the forward order in to the Post Office. No big deal, I thought, it'll be waiting for us when we get there and we'll take care of it then.
I sat down at the laptop to put the forwarding order in (you can do all kinds of stuff on the Postal Service's website) and after I'd filled in all the information I discovered that the Post Office did not want to forward mail to the new address for me at all. It rejected my request based on the fact that the address I gave them was a business address, not a residence. Uh Oh ...

Well, all was not lost ... Robin and I had taken the precaution of securing a Post Office box near to where we'd be working, just as a hedge of safety should we need to have stuff delivered quickly to us rather than through the mail service. I tried to put the forward order in to the P. O. Box ... ... nope, no go. hmmm

The next day was Friday, and we were hoping to leave on Sunday so it was becoming apparent that this last little detail could unravel a lot of planning. I called the Postmaster and explained the situation, she said that it was the the computer safeguarding unauthorized activities and that filling out the paper form, with signatures, and mailing it in would serve the purpose and make the forwarding go.
OK, got the forms package but did not get it mailed out until we were underway (maybe from Kansas or Missouri). No worries, I figured, we'd be a couple of weeks in transit so it should all happen as planned after all. I put together a package with our mailbox keys and a note of thanks to our carrier and another request to change our address and dropped it the mailbox outside our house and off we went on our cross-country venture.

Well, it all pretty much fizzled, I guess. Two weeks later, we still are missing a bunch of mail and we did not get our Colorado ballots. I have no idea what happened, and the Postmaster just assured us that the forwards 'sometimes take a couple of weeks to kick in :(

The downside of 'residing' through a domiciled address also became apparent, because in order for us to vote in Florida we would have to appear in person at our polling place, necessarily in our 'home' county, which is actually about a 6 hour drive north of here. We could not manage to get time off work to make a 12 hour round trip trek and we had to go home Tuesday night having not voted for the first time in ... well, for as long as I've been registered, I guess.

While I was very disappointed, I and while I'm still a little frustrated that the 'system' let me down, I can see how it all came together in a series of little things that all went their own way a little bit. I think that Robin and I planned well and did a lot of things right, and there were some unexpected twists that added up to the eventually missing our voting opportunity.

What you learn along the way is that plans are just that ... plans. The difference between our plans and our experiences is what make life interesting and challenging.

We won't miss the next one...