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.
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