Moving from an apartment downtown to a house in the Northeast caused me to ache all over, but I never expected voting last week to zing me with the biggest pain of all.</p><p>A few weeks ago I went to the Kansas City Board of Election Commissioners office at 19th and Walnut streets to re-register using my new address. Voting has always been a serious family tradition.</p><p>As a kid, my parents took my siblings and me to the polls with them. I have fond memories of the old-fashioned voting booths with the dark curtains that provided a thick screen of privacy.</p><p>Voting should always be non-negotiable to African Americans. For much of this nation&rsquo;s history, black people were kept from participating in the democratic process. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and violence kept people of color from voting.</p><p>In my family, not voting is worse than a crime. It goes against generational struggles, suffering and dying for the right. Our forbearers sacrificed so we could vote.</p><p>Voting was far from a sure thing when I was a kid growing up in the &rsquo;50s and &rsquo;60s in St. Louis. Many blacks nationwide were disenfranchised. They had no vote, no voice and no say in our democracy.</p><p>That enabled whites to grossly exploit them just as slaves were horribly abused, and Jim Crow laws continued the practice a century after the end of the Civil War. My folks made sure we knew the civil rights movement aimed to secure voting rights for all.</p><p>I was just as insistent, taking my daughters to the polls when they were young so they would be as emphatic as adults about being civically engaged.</p><p>That family history drove me to get up early Tuesday to vote before work. But I got a shock at my new polling place: I was told I wasn&rsquo;t registered to vote.</p><p>A couple of weeks earlier, a nice woman at the election board assured me that I had re-registered in time to vote in the election. I even received a card in the mail the week before the election at my new home letting me know the location of the polling place.</p><p>I went to 5108 St. John Ave., but the election officials couldn&rsquo;t find me in their books. They sent me to a troubleshooter in the big room. She searched computer records.</p><p>I didn&rsquo;t exist &mdash; anywhere! I have been a registered voter &mdash; first in Clay County and then in Jackson County &mdash; since May 1977 when I moved to Kansas City. I felt like screaming. The nice woman was apologetic.</p><p>She said I should go downtown to vote because I couldn&rsquo;t even cast a provisional ballot in this costly, one-issue election. Jackson County officials reportedly spent more than $800,000 for the special election to renew the quarter-cent COMBAT anti-drug sales tax. It passed handily even though only 10 percent of Kansas City&rsquo;s registered voters turned out to cast ballots.</p><p>I was determined to be one of them.</p><p>So during lunch on Tuesday I walked from The Star to the election headquarters. A nice man took my driver&rsquo;s license and combed through records to determine whether I was trying to flimflam the system.</p><p>Nope. He found that I was legit, and I was rightfully registered to vote at the St. John polling place. He gave me back my ID and told me to return to the other location and have the people there call him.</p><p>I asked him to write his name and number down on a piece of paper, walked back to The Star and then drove to the polling place. The kind folks there, with little traffic at the polls, called and determined that it was OK to let me cast a ballot.</p><p>They copied down the information from the card the election board mailed to me and let me vote. My refusal to give up in frustration and go away amazed the election officials. I told them that&rsquo;s not how I was made.</p><p>Shelley McThomas, Democratic director at the city election board, said the confusion may have been caused by my odd last name. Some letters probably were transposed in the computer check, rendering me non-existent. She apologized.</p><p>But I wonder how many folks might have surrendered and saved themselves the aggravation and the wasted time and gas. When that happens, it&rsquo;s a loss to individuals and our democracy.