I have bad news for all those who are anxious for next Tuesday to be done with and the election over. I mean, seriously, who is not tired of hearing the constant bickering of campaign commercials on television and the radio?

Here’s the low-down: Provisional ballots may well drag out Tuesday’s election right up to Inauguration Day.

What, you ask, is a provisional ballot? It is a ballot cast by a voter who does not appear on registration rolls on Tuesday and is subject to later verification by election officials. Provisional ballots were adopted as part of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), created to help solve the voting problems of the 2000 election.

In 2000, registered voters in Florida were turned away from the polls because their names had been erroneously left off the registration lists. The provisional ballot stipulation of HAVA was intended to ensure this did not happen again. The problem is that anyone, regardless of whether they are registered, who shows up to the polls on Election Day is entitled to cast a ballot subject to verification procedures.

So that means that all the people asking me to register to vote were asking in vain? Could I have simply not chosen to register and then gone and voted anyway?

Herein lies the problem. The purpose of laws and rules is to provide direction and structure. Without them, we would live in anarchy. In order to have a fair election, we must have rules that not only allow all to vote, but also ensure that votes are cast in honesty.

In Ohio, a key swing state, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell was sued by a liberal group demanding he rescind a rule that said a voter could only cast a provisional ballot at their home polling place. Without this requirement, an unregistered individual could cast a vote in any number of precincts and have their vote counted in each place due to the separate verification processes of each state. If I, as a registered voter, am required to vote at my proper polling place, why should it be any different for an unregistered voter?

Imagine a flood of unregistered voters descending upon a polling place just before closing time, demanding their provisional ballots, and then threatening to sue if the polls were not kept open long enough for them to vote. It will become impossible for us to carry out an election if we simply rewrite all the rules so that there are no rules, or allow all of the rules to be rendered meaningless by threatening to sue.

Registering to vote is not a hard process. In Iowa, you can register to vote when you get your driver’s license. Our secretary of state, Chet Culver, sends us brochures reminding us to vote and asking if we would like to request an absentee ballot. We had people all over campus reminding us to register.

In a democracy, citizens have responsibilities. We should not have to be spoon-fed by our government; we are supposed to take ownership of it. How can we do that if we can’t even get ourselves registered to vote?

Provisional ballots can be subject to exploitation because states can choose to verify the ballots in any way they choose. In the 2002 election for the Colorado Seventh Congressional District seat, the nearly 3,000 provisional ballots cast determined the outcome of the election. Each of the three counties in the district had a different procedure for verification, and it took them 35 days to declare the ballots valid.

Unfortunately, the verification process of all the provisional ballots cast on Tuesday may well drag out declaring a winner yet again.

Let’s take some action and responsibility as citizens and not expect everything on a silver platter.