There seems to be another little culture-war tempest brewing over the matter of college student voting. The "cause du jour" is in New Hampshire, where Republicans in the state assembly say they want to curtail current lenient policies regarding student registration. Specifically, there is talk of (a) requiring most students to vote in the towns they came from rather than where they attend college; and (b) eliminating immediate election-day registration.
The comments on this article (quite a large number of them) fall along predictable lines, with conservatives applauding the move and liberals crying foul.
I don't buy this as a culture-war issue, however; there is no Democratic or Republican side to it.
Students of voting age should certainly be able to vote somewhere. Students may have some equities in local issues but by and large, they are temporary and/or part-time residents in the places where they go to school. The fact that it might be a little more difficult and time consuming to vote absentee in their home towns is irrelevant. If they are old enough to vote, they ought to be responsible enough to apply for an absentee ballot before the deadline. At the same time, however, those who feel more linked to their adopted hometowns should be able to choose to register in their college towns if they want.
The corollary, though, is that there must not be any opening that would permit students to vote in both places. With electronic record-keeping these days, it ought to be possible to ensure that if a student registers himself to vote in "University City," his registration in "Hometown USA" would be automatically canceled. Otherwise, the system is open to fraud. In that same vein, it seems self-evident to me that last-minute registration is potentially fraught with fraud; doing away with it shouldn't be too great a hardship. (Again, we'd have to rely on students to show some inkling of how to plan ahead but hey, if they don't have that after all that college education, so be it.)
Now, having said this isn't a partisan political issue, I must point out that the speaker of the New Hampshire assembly, one William O'Brien, seems to have gone out of his way to make it one, succeeding only in making an ass of himself in the process with this statement:
They're "foolish," Speaker William O'Brien said in a recent speech to a tea party group. "Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do," he added, his comments taped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube. Students lack "life experience," and "they just vote their feelings."
So for O'Brien, it is about politics, and he makes no bones about it. For his benefit I paraphrase one of the many comments from readers of the above article: If it's true that college students all tend to vote "liberal," maybe that's because they're the educated ones.
Or maybe this is more persuasive: the geriatric set represented by O'Brien is just as foolish -- "voting as a regressive," that's what they do, and "they just vote their prejudices."
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