Vote or.... wait?

With the excitement of the upcoming election quickly approaching, many first timers are finally registering to vote. As the myriads of opinionated 18-21 year olds are finally getting their first crack at electing a president, there exists another group of people trying to make their vote count. Legal immigrants, those who did the paper work and are living and working here legally, have to apply for citizenship before they can vote in the election. To apply for citizenship, one must pass a test, fill out a lot of paperwork, and apparently wait forever.

According to a recent CNN.com article, http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/16/nv.immigration.voters/index.html, many legal immigrants are getting stuck in a paper-trail instead of being granted their citizenship. Homeland Security says the whole thing should take 7 months, but Manny Barajas took the first step towards becoming a citizen 6 months ago, and hasn’t received a response, effectively stopping him in his tracks. He was hoping on voting in the primaries this year, but now he might not even be able to vote in the general election.

Another man in the same process named Felipe Lopez has been in the process for 2 years and still isn’t a citizen. He claims that he applied in January last year, passed his citizenship test 16 months ago, and even finished his background test 3 times, the last one being 4 months ago. He hasn’t received word on his citizenship status. The government claims that there are currently 900,000 pending applications, almost two times as many as there were last year. They say that this is simply due to a lack of resources, but this registered voter is skeptical.

The government is supposed to be the most informed organization in the country, so why did their analysts fail to realize that a huge election approaching would lead to higher numbers of people applying for status that would allow them to vote? They would. Unfortunately, they would also realize that these immigrants they are giving the right to vote to would also more than likely vote Democratic. My opinion, they don’t want to let these guys vote, so instead of assigning a few more minimum wage workers to fill out papers and mail envelops, they are cutting back and making a backlog. If these people can’t vote, that is one less person voting for a democrat in ‘08. With the types of activities this administration has been known for doing, is it really that big of a stretch for them to attempt something like this.