As if Americans needed another deadline to add to that list of to-do’s Post-it-noted on their at-work computer screens, here’s a big one: If you live in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington or the District of Columbia, today* is the last day to register to vote if you’d like to cast a ballot in the upcoming Nov. 4 midterms.
Fortunately for everyone—not just Democrats, but independents and Republicans, as well—the Democratic National Committee has launched iwillvote.com, a convenient hub that allows you to either register to vote online, check the status of a pending voter registration, update your existing registration or be reminded of which state you’re currently registered in. Those last two options will be especially useful for those who may have recently moved.
“We created this website as a public service,” Pratt Wiley, the DNC’s national director of voter expansion, explained to The Root. “We know that the single greatest challenge that voters have, in terms of being able to vote, is not understanding the rules of the road.
“When voters know when to vote, where to vote, what they need to bring with them to vote—they’re able to avoid the vast majority of problems that people encounter on any given election day,” he says.
And, clearly, removing bureaucratic obstacles is key, considering that voters typically don’t show up to the election booth in droves for the midterm elections, the way they do for presidential elections every four years.
But there is plenty at stake in these midterms: every seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, about a third of the seats in the U.S. Senate, gubernatorial races in more than half of the states, and the fates of a record number of African-American candidates on ballots at the local, state and federal levels.
*Montana and Washington, D.C., also have same-day voter registration. Utah residents can register in person for another two weeks.