I went to the Urbana School Board meeting last night regarding the future of Washington Early Childhood.  Of course, no school board meeting in the state happens these days without some discussion of payments from the State of Illinois.  Superintendent Preston Williams informed the group that the State of Illinois was $4.8 million behind in payments to the district.

A little relief is in sight for the school district, and every other taxing body in the County.  The first distribution of property tax payments should hit their bank accounts tomorrow.  For Urbana schools that is a payment of $4.6 million which represents about 17% of what they’ll end up receiving from property tax revenues.

It bears noting that while the state plays games with tax dollars and withholds tax revenues due to local governments, the County is paying on time and in full.  Once a month, the Treasurer makes  a distribution of all that has been collected to that point.

The Township Assessors, Supervisor of Assessments Office, Board of Review, County Clerk, and County Treasurer work as a team to get tax bills out by May 1st each year.  Because of the great work of this team, we’re able to mitigate the disaster that we face from a state that fails to meet their obligations.

I’m preparing to go back to Springfield today to testify against yet another attempt to force Champaign County to open an early voting site on campus.  In preparing testimony, I found an interesting article, College students in the 2004 Election.  It was prepared by The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement.  The key element for the purposes of the campus voting bill is here.

Most students were registered to vote, and turnout was high. Nearly 90% (88%) of the students said they were registered to vote. Of these, nearly 90% (88%) said they voted. This means that overall, some 77% of the students said they voted. Similar percentages of freshmen through seniors voted.

This rate of turnout is very high when compared to non-college students. According to CIRCLE’s analysis of national exit poll data and vote tallies, approximately 42% of all 18-24s voted. Thus, in 2004 as in other recent years, college students were nearly twice as likely to vote as young people who do not attend college.

The fact that college students vote at higher numbers than their non college counterparts is reflected in Champaign County as well.  Roughly speaking, 76% of the young voters in the campus area voted last time.  Just 61% outside of the campus area did.

I’ve written before about the MOVE Act, federal legislation that attempts to facilitate voting by overseas and military voters. At the time I wrote about it, I noted something interesting.

One change is the effective period for a Federal Post Card Application (FPCA).  Before this law passed, a person who submits an FPCA is applying for a ballot for the next two federal election years.  So an application in 2005 would have entitled a person to a ballot for the 2006 and 2008 federal elections.  The new law changes that to a single year.  Now, military and overseas voters will have to submit a new application each and every year that they want to vote.

I noted how this flew in the face of other efforts to sign up people without their knowledge or consent.

At the time, I understood that this would mean that fewer military people would be signed up.  Common sense tells us that if you require people to sign up every year instead of every four years, you’re going to see a drop off.

Now, we receive word from the folks who oversee the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act that they are concerned about the drop in the number of people receiving ballots.  Here is the email that was  sent to state officials.

Director Carey is concerned that the repeal of Section 104 of UOCAVA is having a negative impact on the total number of UOCAVA citizens with active ballot requests on file. To address this issue, we are asking for your data. Specifically, we are asking for  the number of active ballot requests from UOCAVA citizens as of April 30, 2010, as well as the same information from April 30, 2008. If you have this information broken down to include the number of uniformed service voters and overseas citizen voters, please let us know.

I’ll give Director Carey the benefit of the doubt and assume that he knew this would be the outcome of the law but couldn’t stop it.  But I’m curious as to whether a rewrite will be in the works for this totally predictable but apparently unexpected outcome.