How many people in this community worked for the university? How many private businesses existed to service the students? How many people worked at those businesses? What would happen to the community if the university just up and left the campus a vacant lot subject to property taxes? What about the students who lived off campus? The were (through their landlords) paying property taxes. What about the sales taxes on stuff the purchased? Or the income taxes payed buy the off-campus businesses they spent their money at?
OK. I just read the article. I was way off (obviously). Sorry about that.
But now that I understand what the guy is saying, it’s not as bad as I thought. He’s not suggesting the taking away the person’s right to vote… he’s suggesting the person should vote where they have established residency. I’ll come back to this one.
The second and third items are a bit easier for me. I do like the idea that you cannot register to vote on the day of the vote. The only way I can see this being possible without being chaotic is to have the registration done in a different building than the actual voting is going on in (or another floor of same building). I think it’s important to keep the voting lines moving, so removing a time occupier like registering is a no-brainer to me. I’ve worked the polls during election day. Folks can get frustrated enough if they are caught in a line for a legitimate reason. To ask registered voters to wait until 6 people in front of them register first is not exactly making the voting experience a positive one for the registered voter. I want registered voters to continue to come out. I would also like to see something like registration at the polls on election day be a thing of the past. This would include everyone, not just the college student. Perhaps the elderly would be hit by this too, but I don’t see it hitting them too hard. Odds are they have lived in the same neighborhood longer than 9 months (or whatever the residency requirement is), so they would have plenty of opportunity to register before the deadline.
My suggestions would be ok with me I guess (another building or another floor), but getting volunteers to man the polling place is hard enough. Having to find someone else to be responsible for registering people on election day would suck.
I also believe that having an ID should be a requirement for every election, except maybe your high school variety. I really don’t see why this is an issue for either side. Are there significant blocks of certain voters that walk around without ID at all times? Who are these people?
As for the college kid voting in the town where he/she is going to school… I think it should just follow the state guidelines for establishing residency. Where the student pays his/her taxes if he/she works, if car insurance reflects the home address and not the school address (or the school’s town), then they should vote at their legal residence. I’ve absentee ballot voted many times, and don’t see why this is a big issue either, unless some group is using a bus to gather a bunch of kids that don’t live permanently in the area to vote on area issues. For those residents who DO live in that kind of area, I think it would stink for college kids to have the ability to vote on school board, or city council members. Things like that should remain with the residents of that community. Again, if the student establishes residency in the college town, then by all means, they should vote. But not someone who may not even be from the same STATE.
Anyway, my apologies for not reading the article before posting.
I disagree with this in large part because most local elections are important to the people who live there. Like I mentioned in my previous post, having a college student vote on who would be on the school board where my child attends school makes absolutely no sense, and yet, it could have a major impact on that type of election.
While all that is true, they don’t pay nearly as much taxes as the people that live there in general and they don’t care as much about the local community in general.
While there are exceptions, the majority are not from there nor plan on staying there. Maybe they shouldn’t be voting there.
I’m not saying I AGREE with the stance…I’m just saying it is not an absurd position to take nor dismiss out of hand. It is a valid argument open for debate.
You don’t know what you’re typing about.
I have been a head election judge for 9 years in Minnesota
Every one of those nine years we have had same-day registration.
On especially busy elections (presidential, naturally) we’ve had has many as 30% of the voters registering same-day. Given that we have 1700-1800 people on the election register to begin with, that’s a lot of registrations.
We’ve never had any problems with registrations. You just get a few more election judges to handle the registrations, and a savvy, experienced judge to oversee the registration process. A couple more to direct people into lines. No muss, no fuss. In my precinct you’re in and out in 20-30 minutes tops at any time after 8 a.m. (Polls open at 7 a.m., close at 8 p.m.)
Given that the last two major elections my work has been checked by a manual recount and found accurate (once my precinct count was dead on, once it was one vote off, and I’ll bet it was that guy who filled out his absentee ballot in red ink), I think I can say that any jurisdiction that can’t handle same-day registration is incompetent.
Any jurisdiction that wants to abolish same-day registration is intent on disenfranchising voters.
Many people live sketchy lives. I’m a middle class, middle-aged guy, and I can’t imagine not having a driver’s license. But even in my middle class neighborhood, I encounter all sorts of voters who don’t have a government driver’s license (at least not from this state). Remember, this isn’t the Soviet Union. We don’t have to carry papers.
I am particularly struck by the fact that Indiana was the state whose voter ID bill was upheld by the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, it’s Indiana where the Secretary of State has been indicted for voter fraud. Voter ID doesn’t seem to solve all problems.
Aha! ACORN!
The initial assertion was that people are voting somewhere where they don’t have a long term vested interest (by living there for an extended period), so obviously old people should be judged by the same standard. This whole discussion goes pretty much off the rails by discounting all college students as lazy, pot smoking, transients. I could see that people should be encouraged to vote in the area where they spend the majority of that year, but the 9 months most students live in their college town more than qualifies them. The idea that they don’t contribute tax revenue is laughable: do they work where their parents live, buy all of their goods there, rent houses and apartments there, etc? In some ways, they are almost ‘ideal’ taxpayers- it’s unlikely they are clamoring for improved schools, roads and utilities, and they are probably paying a greater amount of their income right back into the community than most other citizens. If you can prove that college students somehow have a negative economic impact on their communities, I’d love to see it.
And why shouldn’t they be represented on the state level as well? I’m making an assumption for out of state students here, but surely they should be able to have some voice in how the state board of regents decides tuition raises, crime enforcement (I think most universities fall under ‘state’ jurisdiction rather than local) and other issues.
As for making them vote wherever their parents live, that assumes that most or all students are somehow tied to that community and intend to return there once they graduate. In reality, there are 3 options post graduation:
A-Move back in with parents or to hometown.
B-Stay in same city as college
C-Move somewhere else altogether.
Even with the recession, I would be surprised if A accounts for even a fraction of B & C. So why make them vote there?
Let’s call a spade a spade and recognize this as a blatant attempt to exclude presumed ‘liberal’ voters from participating. It’s like ‘solving’ your homelessness problem by renting a bus and just shipping all of the bums to the next town over.
Are you suggesting that people who do not have children attending public school should be prohibited from voting for the school board, for raises in property tax, etc.?
And in general, are you suggesting that people should not be allowed to vote unless they have demonstrated ties to the community? How do you define ties to the community?
I’ve been voting for 35 years. With the exception of my 18 years in Colorado, I have never cast a vote in a place where I had lived for more than two years. (I may nudge that up to three years here in Missouri in April.) Are you proposing to disenfranchise me for half of my voting life?
How do you disenfranchise college students without doing the same to me?
Well, OK, you too, then. Hey, he insisted!
Up here, in federal election, students can simply choose whether they prefer to use their one vote in their parents’ riding or the riding in which they are living while at school. For provincial and municipal elections, the provinces establish their own rules.
How do they plan to get around the 26th Amendment?
While I’m pretty sure that was recently typical Bricker snarkiness, I’m not sure why he’d need to look any further than that case, as it seems to cover the bases pretty well.
The thread title is misleading. It’s not about age restrictions. It’s about restricting where students can vote.
You pose some good questions. Just so we are clear, I haven’t suggested that if you don’t have children or your children don’t attend the public school, that you don’t have a right to vote in local elections. As you point out, property taxes can be determined by the folks elected locally, so of course, if you live there legally you should have a vote. I never said anything different.
Students should also possess the power to vote locally (near the school they attend) if they’ve established residency in that area. No problem with that either. so, in your case, I assume you changed your driver’s license, mail delivery, auto insurance, etc to reflect the new address? Sounds to me like you established residency. Whether you established it 3 months or 10 years ago, I don’t care. Just as long as you’ve met the residency requirements, you are ok to vote in your local election as far as I’m concerned.
For my particular location, I sure do. You have no idea where I live, the polling places I’ve worked, or the kind of volunteer support we get to work a poll. So, I would suggest that you have no idea what you are typing about.
That’s nice. I don’t live in Minnesota. Your stories don’t reflect my experience at all.
That’s also nice.
That’s nice, too. How does this apply to me?
Bolding mine. So where do I get these election judges? we can’t just pull them out of our asses. They have to actually, you know, exist. And I suppose that savvy, experienced judge would be you? Well, it seems you might be busy during election day.
In your state, maybe. I have no idea about Minnesota’s election laws or procedures. So I have to take your word on what you are typing. However, it’s difficult to believe you are as special as you think you are. Try managing those same day registrations without any extra people.
I would say that given the amount of limited resources we have had in the past, we’ve managed just fine. I don’t see the resources changing, and I don’t see my particular poll to be changing demographics any time soon. So yeah, please register to vote before the deadline. If you do, you will find that you can breeze through the lines and vote very quickly.
Not really. There are all types of responsibilities we have as citizens. Many of them have a deadline associated with them. For example, if I want to drive my car, I have to have up-to-date insurance, my car has to be registered, and the car needs to be inspected. All of those things have a date that proof must be acquired by. I don’t see why voting has to have special rules. You register to vote before the deadline in your area. Everyone has the same rules. So I honestly don’t see how a rule to have pre-registered to vote is disenfranchising anyone.
The proposed rules are technically about that, but the stated goal is to restrict students because they’re ‘young and foolish and vote liberal.’ You can pretty up the technicalities all you want, but it’s plain as day in the article: The reason this is being done is to keep kids from voting liberal.
But that’s not remotely discriminatory, they don’t want anybody to vote liberal!
No. Why? (Seriously - what reasons do Americans have? Other than the right-wing fear of “identification papers, please”? Which is rather silly given that SSN are used de-facto identifaction already, because it’s necessary to uniquly identifiy individuals in many databases with national comparisions; only with the disadvantage that the SSN is very insecure because it was not intended as national ID.)
You do know that comparisions like this make you sound like a right-wing idiot, don’t you? Because having a national ID independet from car license, secure to a national standard (not paper licenses like in some state), easily recognizable because of one national design (unlike the current state with 50 different designs, so people from Florida aren’t recognized as adults by store clerks in Maine etc.) IS NOT at all similar to having a dictatorship / police state like the Soviet Union. Really, I promise.
You’ve had more freedoms taken away with the Patriot Act, holding suspects without lawyers on Gitmo, than you would loose with the establishment of a national ID.
You realize that any one of those college students could run to sit on the school board for the district where your child attends? Or the city council that runs your town? How does it not make sense? Do you not realize that a not small number of the students at that college do practicums and student teaching in the schools in your district and hope to be employed there one day, and probably know more about the administration of your local schools than the majority of citizens?
Poor people. Especially poor people without jobs, who don’t drive, have disabilities and/or don’t have bank accounts. That’s a lot of people. There are communities where the majority of adults do not have a current, valid ID. They may have had one at one time, but the cost of renewal and/or inaccessibility of renewal sites present a barrier to keeping them. Unless or until the cards for Medicaid, Medicare, TANF and SNAP start being issued with photographs and become legally accepted as a government-issued ID, you’re going to run into a lot of people who don’t have something that would be acceptable for voting.
If states are going to mandate that non-drivers must have the state-issued non-driver ID in order to vote, unless those cards are free, and the supporting documents required to get them (like birth certificates and marriage/divorce documentation of name changes) are also issued for free (which they aren’t, anywhere) then the requirement becomes tantamount to a poll tax. Even if the cost is only $10 or $15 for the new photo ID every four years, it’s still a requirement that people pay the state in order to exercise their right to vote.