Exactly. Colleges tend to attract and concentrate the smart, left-leaning kids from all over the state. If they’re all allowed to vote in the districts where they attend school, they’re liable to elect Democrats and maybe even help enact protections against LGBTQ people. Can’t have that. Whereas, if their votes are restricted to their hometowns they’ll be diluted by the right-thinking decent people who dominate those districts.
I’m not sure how it breaks down, but I’d guess a strong majority don’t vote at all, and the ones that do probably go about 50/50 home/school.
(If you are weird, it is that you voted at all)
Isn’t that the plot of Star Wars?
Back to the Future.
I am your density!
I am not sure this is true, at least where I went to school. Of course, when I went to school, the only ID you needed to vote was your voter registration card. Admittedly, this was 40+ years ago.
My college ID did not have an address or implied any residency. The IDs of out-of-state students were the same as in-state. Even foreign students had the same student ID. To register to vote, you had to indicate residency, but I believe all that entailed was filling out your address on the form and signing it attesting that the information was correct. Then they would mail you your voter registration card. I believe that is how the residency issue was addressed back then. If you didn’t live there, you wouldn’t get your registration card, so you couldn’t vote. Today, since you don’t need a voter registration card, that is no longer effective.
I think the reason for not accepting a student ID for voting is the Republicans have this conspiracy theory that millions of Democratic operatives are gathering information on registered voters who don’t vote. Then, they use that information to obtain ballots, which they fill out voting for only Democratic candidates. My guess is their fear is that if a Student ID could be used for in-person voting, they think these operatives would round-up voter registered students, take their IDs and send mules to the polls to vote in-person. I know, sounds like a lot of trouble and way too complicated, but these guys love their conspiracy theories.
And that’s the point. It’s the “death by a thousand cuts” plan. Sure, this one form of ID may only be used by a fraction of a percent of voters, but that also applies to every other form of ID they’re restricting. Each one banned makes it just a little bit harder to vote, which means just a few more people decide it isn’t worth the effort, and each bit of that adds up.
When elections have hundreds of thousands of votes cast, and the winner is determined by only a few hundred or thousand votes, every percent matters.
This is much closer to the truth, aside from the idea that it is all merely performance legislation. There is no reason not to use a student ID (particularly from a state school) as a form of government-issued photo ID. It is issued by an agency of the state and all it does is identify the person. That is it’s purpose. Now, I can see not accepting a student ID from the Karl Marx Academy for a Supreme Society (known as KMASS) as an ID, since for all anyone knows, they could issue photo IDs to anyone with any name and residency they want, but not to accept the ID from a State School means the Legislature does not trust its own agency.
Of course, this is most likely simply performance legislation, as I mentioned earlier. They aren’t trying to prevent anyone from voting (certainly, most people in college who want to vote will find a way to do it), they are just trying to convince the voters that the individual legislators are doing a good job at preventing voter fraud (which, you can tell, is rampant in Idaho, as revealed by the political leanings of the citizens vs. political make-up of the Legislature) – that last parenthetical comment is sarcasm.
Sure, they could go and register their college dorm room with the BMV if they want to vote enough.
But the point is to put up barriers to make them have to work at it, they need to have to want to vote enough.
Let’s say that you go to Ohio State University. You want to go register your address, so you can take a 1 1/2 hour walk to the nearest BMV.
Then 1 1/2 hours back. After waiting in line for however long.
You need to really want to vote to do that.
ETA: (Huh, the map that I thought I linked had walking directions from the campus to the BMV, and this doesn’t. Now sure what’s up with that)
The student ID of OSU also works as a bus pass inside the city of Columbus.
Fair enough, so it’s a 15 minute walk and a 20 minute bus ride. I was just using OSU as an example as I’m somewhat familiar with the campus. I don’t know if you get such a perk at universities in Idaho. (And in Ohio, you can use your college ID to vote)
Point is, it’s an extra hoop to go through that exists for no purpose other than to decrease voter turnout.
Oh, you sweet summer child. Of course they are trying to prevent people from voting. The entire Voter ID concept exists to prevent people from voting.
Republicans ginned up voter fraud concerns (without any evidence to back up their claims) for the express purpose of enabling them to enact restrictive voter laws to prevent people from voting. Restrictive laws can be expected to hit marginalized communities harder than established communities, benefiting R’s in the final tally.
Damn few of them will admit it but GOP political operatives are terrified of the 100 million eligible voters born since 1980. Most tightened registration restrictions are designed to impede that cohort which, truthfully, is easier to discourage in the first place.
To be fair, they did commit a lot of voter fraud themselves to prove voter fraud does in fact exist!
You edited out the introductory sentence for what you quoted. I added it back, above, for context.
Sure, if you wanted, you take a 1-1/2 hour walk. If you didn’t have the time and figured you didn’t need the exercise, though, you could do it online.
My point is this requirement, although stupid and not likely to withstand an appeal, is more to make the Legislators look good in the eyes of their constituents than to decrease Democratic turnout. They think they are stopping voter fraud, and will accuse anyone who opposes it as wanting to increase voter fraud, but in the end, it is more a nothing burger than anything.
Well, you can repeat it, but it doesn’t make it any more true. I didn’t include it as I was not responding directly to it, but you are in fact incorrect on that. It’s not merely performative, it is meant to decrease voter turnout among college students.
I’ve not done that, and certainly not in Idaho, as this case is. I assume that you are saying that it is free to get your address updated and have a new ID sent out to you for you to use in voting? I know that if I go in person there is a fee.
If there is a fee, then that’s another hoop they are putting in place to prevent them from voting.
What makes you think it won’t withstand an appeal?
This I disagree with entirely. The intent here is to decrease voter turnout, and they’d actually rather that the regular voters not be aware of what they are doing.
That’s the excuse they use, yes. It’s the excuse they use to try to prevent people who lean Democratic from voting.
And even if it’s free, it’s still an extra hoop to jump through. And if students don’t happen to learn about that hoop in time to get a new ID sent before the election? Oh, too bad, but you can’t vote.
Yeah, it’s all about shaving off a percent here, a few percent there.
It used to be that when I registered to vote, I got a voter registration card with my name and address, and I could show that at the polls as proof of my registration. (And half the time they didn’t even look at it, they just found my name in their book and marked me off.)
Then, in the interest of “preventing voter fraud” (which rarely happens anyway, and when it does it’s usually a Republican) the GOP decided that your government issued voter ID wasn’t good enough, you had to have a photo ID, and all the info had to be correct. If you didn’t already have one, like a driver’s license, then you had to go get one. The point is to filter out the people where it is too much of a burden for them to comply with their stupid rules, so they just don’t go vote. And who are these voters? Largely Democrats.
It’s the same deal with the college IDs. Make it too much of a burden to comply, and they won’t bother voting. Just keep chipping away at the edges until you eventually get what you want. They learned it with abortion restrictions and now are applying it to voting to make sure they stay in power.
Will no one address witch on witch violence?
IIRC, the Voting Rights Act allows students to vote in the precinct they live in while they are in college. So if I were a resident of Virginia, but I go to school at North Carolina State, then I would be allowed to vote in Raleigh.
That’s how Watagua County stopped being a dry county. Nearly all the students at Appalachian State stayed in school for an extra week so they could vote on the referendum.
Here we go again: Canada as a threat to US national security, this time with a Mexican Assist!
It came during a hearing organized by Republicans titled: “Biden’s Growing Border Crisis: Death, Drugs, and Disorder on the Northern Border.”
I swear, if they spent half as much time trying to actually make improvements as they do coming up with catchy titles, the US would be a paradise.