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2004 US Presidential Election
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August 31, 2004
| Students fight to register in college towns

AP: Students fight to register in college towns

With so much emphasis on getting young people to the polls this election, the issue of where college students can register to vote is getting more attention. And some students — who believe they should have the right to vote where they live most of the year — are getting organized.

“We plan to push this issue,” says Han, a 21-year old junior at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, who’s originally from a Seattle suburb. “Students are being disenfranchised.”

Han spent the summer interning in Washington, D.C., where he met Lowe and other students who share his cause. They formed the grass-roots Student Voting Rights Campaign.

Now the group is calling for a “day of action” on Sept. 23, urging students to register en masse — even if they meet with resistance.

What do you think?



Posted by Laurence Simon at August 31, 2004 12:03 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Of course they should be able to register wherever they have a legal residence. One man, one vote. It’s a basic right remember? If they are not at home to vote, they have the right to vote wherever they are living.

That Mayor of New Paltz, NY who was marrying gays recently is an interesting case. He was running on the Green party slate along with several others running for town council. New Paltz is a small town and the Mayor and town council were seldom challenged, so only a few hundred people ever bothered to vote, assuming they already knew what the outcome would be.

The Greens used their cars and SUVs to ferry a few hundred students from the local college to the polls and won a big upset. Not just the Mayor won but the majority on the town council too.

Why is this a good thing? It teaches a very fundamental lesson in democracy. The townfolk were complacent and didn’t bother to vote. You don’t vote, you have no right to complain. They’ll know better next time. But no one can deny those students the right to vote.

Posted by: old_timer [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 31, 2004 01:29 PM

This question isn’t new; it pops up almost every election cycle. I doubt the reasons this time are new or any better.

Reaching the age of maturity (or at least legal adulthood) confers certain obligations, one of which is voting, so it is great to see these college-agers are aggressively seeking to perform this one.

I hope the time spent pursuing it does not make them miss their first logic class wherein the first minutes will be enough for it to dawn on them that their claim of disenfranchisement is spurious. And I pray that, remembering their Civics from high school, they have registered as residents in the legally required time for the community in which they claim to be living most of the time and maybe even notified their previous County Clerk’s office to remove them from their voting rolls.

Hey, they might even consider contributing to the tax base of their new community by also aggressively fighting for the university to pay some reasonable proportion of a property tax based on the temporary residents who want to stick their nose into local affairs while they are there.

Otherwise, people like Han can call their mommy on their parentally subsidized cell phone from their taxpayer subsidized dorm room as ask her to send an absentee ballot because he forgot to get it when he was home doing something not so aggressive, like …. whatever!

Sorry, I’m grumpy today!

Posted by: John [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 31, 2004 01:37 PM

Sounds like you nailed on the head… grumpy or not. The only disenfancished voters in this country are the ones who do not vote by choice or by ignoring the established rules and regulations that must be followed in a timely manner to be able to vote… then again, a lot of these students are not much into this establishment thing anyway, right?

You can’t go to any official state office these days without being bombarded by messages on how to register to vote in any number of different ways. But some folks just don’t care which helps explain why we have only about a 50% voter turnout or less each election.

Posted by: steve [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 31, 2004 03:27 PM

This seems to have some characteristics in common with the attempt in CA to give 2/5 of a vote to 14-year-olds.

Posted by: Lonewacko [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 31, 2004 04:25 PM

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