After the bank took Amanda Moore-Stevens' home last year and her husband died of a heart attack, changing her voter registration to her new address was not a priority.
"It wasn't something I was thinking about," said Moore-Stevens, of Fairfield.
But not doing so meant Moore-Stevens and the thousands of other local voters who recently lost their homes through foreclosure risked losing their right to vote in the upcoming election, too.
That worry has been abated. A spokeswoman from the secretary of state's office told The Bee this week that people who recently lost their homes can still vote at their old precincts. Several local registrars confirmed that they will allow voters to cast ballots either where they used to live or, by provisional ballot, at their new address without re-registering.
(For those who don't want to risk it, there is still time to re-register: the deadline is Oct. 20.)
Granting leeway was no minor concession. Last month alone, banks took the homes of more than 2,000 registered voters in the four-county Sacramento region, according to a Bee analysis of voter registration records and data from foreclosures.com. Extend those numbers out to the past year and at least 25,000 registered voters have been displaced.
Although Moore-Stevens did eventually re-register, many of them likely did not.
Allowing foreclosed homeowners to vote without re-registering could play a role in local election results, The Bee's analysis found. Poorer areas with a high proportion of minorities were hit hardest by the mortgage crisis and those areas tend to vote Democratic.
Of the roughly 2,000 voters displaced by foreclosure in September, 44 percent were Democrats – compared to 40 percent of all voters – while 32 percent were Republicans and 23 percent declined to state a political affiliation.
The registrars say the law already allowed people living at a temporary address to vote at their previous home and, they say, it's in nobody's interest to vigilantly scrub voters who've fallen on hard times.
"We don't see it as being a problem," said Jill Lavine, Sacramento County's registrar of voters. "Just because they are leaving their home, they are still a registered voter."
County registration offices regularly deal with a shifting population – roughly 290,000 adults across the region moved to a new house last year, census figures show – so the foreclosure crisis isn't an insurmountable hurdle. That's especially true in Yolo County, where students change housing all the time.
For those who lost their homes to foreclosure, "ideally, you would re-register at your new address," said Yolo County Registrar Freddie Oakley. But, she added, "we are accustomed to a ton of mobility, so they will probably still be on the list of eligible voters."
As to whether loosening up the registration requirements could lead to fraud – it's hard to keep voter rolls clean when multiple families claim to live at the same address – the registrars said the signature requirement at the polls should prevent most attempts.
Oakley noted that her offices often don't keep close track of how many people are living in one house, nor could they easily tell whether that was too many for the dwelling.
The California secretary of state's elections office has weighed in on the issue, too, saying state law allows voters who recently were forced from their homes to keep their old registration until they find something permanent. The reasoning is that it would be unfair to disenfranchise someone without a stable home who is, for instance, living temporarily in a motel.
"The voter can choose his domicile as long as he has some sort of attachment to the house," said Norma Gray, El Dorado County's assistant registrar.
In many ways, voters who recently lost their homes have the most incentive to vote. A distraught former homeowner is like a soldier on the front lines: Both groups are keenly interested and personally affected by the decisions their leaders will make.
People deep in debt, facing shoddy credit and living in a smaller, rented home, find it difficult to be optimistic about the economic future.
"Barack Obama doesn't know me, and John McCain doesn't know me," said Brian Paynter, a Lincoln resident who accepted a short sale for his home to stave off foreclosure and now lives with his in-laws. "My family can't help me, so how is some guy in Washington, D.C., going to help me."
Moore-Stevens, the Fairfield resident, has a bit more hope – if not for her, then for her friends.
"I think we're in a mess," she said. "I'm voting for Obama. I'm hoping he's going to reduce other people's mortgages. I know so many people who are losing their homes."
Call The Bee's Phillip Reese, (916) 321-1137.
