We saw this during the primaries with statements such as, "The Iowa caucuses should only be for Iowans," but it's starting back up for the general election:
If you're a student and you're reading this, the Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that you have the right to register to vote in your college town. You do not have to change your driver's license or your license plates, nor will you lose your financial aid or your insurance. It doesn't matter what you're "primary residence" is, just as long as you have a residence in your college town and you're not trying to vote in more than one place. I'm registered to vote in Missouri, yet I have New York tags on my car (from buying it in Ithaca, although I'll change that to Missouri when they expire) and a Tennessee driver's license (add all that to the fact that I have Missouri insurance and it's going to be a lot of fun to explain to the cops should I ever get pulled over here, but I digress).Late last month, as a voter-registration drive by supporters of Senator Barack Obama was signing up thousands of students at Virginia Tech, the local registrar of elections issued two releases incorrectly suggesting a range of dire possibilities for students who registered to vote at their college.
The releases warned that such students could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns, a statement the Internal Revenue Service says is incorrect, and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents’ car and health insurance.
I don't think this is necessarily a Republican or a Democratic thing most of the time, and it may very well not be in the Virginia case either. In a lot of instances, municipalities simply don't want students voting in local elections. You know how it goes, they're perfectly content to receive the jobs and tax revenues that a university brings, but God forbid the students who make all that possible should have a say in how the town they live in most of the year is run. The original Supreme Court case came about from a mostly white town in Texas not wanting the students at an historically black college in the town to have any say.
Although the Obama campaign thinks that what happened in Virginia was simply a mistake, I would hope that both he and McCain take a stand against the illegal and deceptive practices that are used every election cycle to keep students from voting.
4 comments:
I think you're too soft on the students. In Berkeley, one of the biggest problems in town is that the students are incredibly short-term in their political thinking. As a result, we have totalitarian rent control, very high rents, and the bay area's worst homelessness problem.
But the solution to that is educating the students as to why voting for stuff like that is against their interests as well as yours, not taking away their right to vote in Berkeley altogether.
The problem is, it isn't against their personal interests. Rent control is a good thing, if you've recently moved in, and aren't worried about long-term social consequences. It's short-sided, but the students are gone before the negative consequences hit.
The current students just don't have the same interests as permanent residents and future students. So I don't think education is a sufficient answer.
It may very well be though. Graduate students stick around for longer, and I'd imagine that more students decide to stick around in the Bay Area than in, say, Ithaca.
High rents are a natural fixture of smaller college towns, where the supply of off-campus housing is limited but the demand is constant. I'm paying hundreds of dollars less in rent for my apartment in St. Louis than I would be paying for one of similar size and quality in Ithaca. So the pitch you make to students is that getting rid of rent controls will encourage landlords to offer more housing options, which wouldn't necessarily cause rents to go up significantly.
My point is simply that people living in college towns can't just take the jobs and revenue that a university and its students provide and then turn around and say that they can't have a say simply because you don't like how they're going to vote.
Post a Comment