WireTap
(May
23, 2004)
Banning the Vote
By Megan Tady
If only students would go out and vote.
Except their vote isn't welcome in Brunswick, Maine. Or in Prairie View, Texas.
Or, as a matter of fact, in Utica, New York. All of these college towns ��� and
many others ��� have local statutes that limit students from establishing
residency and registering to vote.
Their vote is certainly not welcome in Williamsburg, Virginia, home to the
College of William and Mary, where the city council has passed anti-student
laws, blocked students from becoming residents, restricted students from
registering to vote, and thwarted any effort made by students to change the
discriminatory policies by running for office.
Among other things, the city council passed "owner occupancy"
agreements on housing, making it increasingly difficult for students to find
housing near campus, and evicted some students from their homes mid-semester for
violating the archaic "three-to-a-house rule" ��� no more than three
unrelated people can live together in a house in Williamsburg.
So when three of the five seats on the city council were up for grabs in the
spring of 2003, four students ��� Serene Alami, Robert Forrest, Seth Saunders,
and Luther Lowe, tired of not being able to voice their concerns in their town
��� announced their candidacy. A week later, all four students received voter
registration denials. The grounds? They didn't qualify as residents of
Williamsburg.
Even though students used to be able to register to vote in Williamsburg using
their dorm address, the registrar had begun to require students to fill out a
tricky two-page questionnaire to determine residency, asking such questions as:
Where is your car registered? Are you a dependent on your parent's tax return?
What community activities are you involved in? (The questionnaire specified
church.)
Using the results of the questionnaire, the Williamsburg registrar determined
some students were ineligible to register to vote in Williamsburg, effectively
banning them from participating in local politics.
Although the 26th Amendment guarantees students the right to vote and a 1979
U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that students can vote where they attend
school if they establish residency, it remains unclear what constitutes
residency. Local election boards have been able to fill in the gaps, and under
the Virginia Constitution, eligible voters must have a physical abode in a town
with the intent to live there for an unlimited time.
"Because the law is so ambiguous, it leaves the decisions up to people who
aren't legal experts about who has the right to vote," says Serene Alami,
one of the four students who attempted to run for city council.
Both Lowe and Alami, with the help of the Virginia ACLU, challenged their
denials, first in federal court, and then, when the case was sent back, in the
circuit court. The judge overturned Lowe's denial because, although he is
originally from Arkansas, he had committed to six years with the Virginia
National Guard. Alami's registration denial, however, was upheld, with her
in-state status and her attempt to run for a four-year seat on the city council
not enough to prove she planned to live in Williamsburg for an "unlimited
time."
"Students shouldn't have to join the National Guard to vote. It doesn't
make sense for Serene to vote for the school board in Roanoke, where her parents
live," Lowe says. "It makes sense for her to vote where the issues
affect her most ��� where we need crosswalks and get parking tickets. We should
be able to vote where we have a direct stake in what's happening."
"Here I am trying to do what a good citizen should do ��� voting and
running for office to try to change things ��� and somebody tells me I
can't," Alami says.
Along with appealing her case, which is still pending, Alami put her energy into
helping Lowe gain the 125 signatures needed to get him on the city council
ballot. Only after she collected some of the signatures was she told by the city
council that non-residents cannot collect signatures. The council only deemed
124 signatures "considerable," and Lowe was unable to get his name on
the ballot.
"It just further illustrated how ludicrous this was and showed how they are
actively working to ensure that students don't have a voice in the
community," Lowe said.
Seth Saunders was also denied the right to run for city council in
Williamsburg, and Rob Forrest quit school, moved off campus, sold his car, and
got a local job in order to qualify for residency and run for a seat. He was not
elected.
"It's frustrating to think that people habitually complain about youth
being apathetic, but any effort made by youth to change that is shot down,"
Alami says. "And it's not just happening in Virginia."
Don't Rock the (V)Boat
It's happening all over the country. Despite the fact that students live in
their college towns eight months of the year for four to five years and are
counted by the U.S. census in their college towns, the practice of intimidating
and harassing young voters is spreading to various college towns like a flu
virus in a campus dorm ��� from claiming voting will affect students' financial
aid, to giving them lengthy questionnaires, to asking them to provide driver's
licenses.
"If you have a university town that bars students from voting, you are
effectively raising the voting age in that town," says Peter Maybarduk,
cofounder of the voting rights organization Your Williamsburg.
Student disenfranchisement happened at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine,
where the registrar turned students away after she asked misleading residency
questions, and in other towns in Maine, including Bar Harbor, Gorham, Farmington
and Standish.
Damien Cave's recent Rolling Stone article, "Mock the Vote,"
highlighted that it's also happened at Hamilton College in Utica, New York, at
Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, in Arkansas at Ouachita Baptist
University and Henderson State University, and at the University of New
Hampshire.
It also happened at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, where the district
attorney intimidated students from voting by warning that a 10-year prison
sentence and a $10,000 fine would be issued to anyone caught "illegally
voting." The students have since settled a lawsuit with Kitzman, who issued
a public apology. Prairie View A&M was the site of the U.S. Supreme Court's
decision to allow students to vote where they attend school after black students
were banned from voting 25 years ago.
"I don't know how this compares to women's suffrage or the Civil Rights
Movement," Alami says. "But I do know it's a systematic denial of a
group of people their constitutional rights."
It isn't that students are being denied the right to vote outright ��� they
still have the option of voting by absentee ballot in their hometowns. But
voting by absentee ballot isn't always a sufficient solution.
"It requires a lot of forethought, which many Americans, not just students,
don't contemplate," Maybarduk says. "Beyond that, it still prevents
them from voting on the issues that affect them where they live. It's much more
difficult for students to stay up to speed on issues, and impossible to serve on
commissions or introduce a ballot initiative. It goes against the meaning of
teaching civic engagement in college."
A study titled "Democracy and College Student Voting," published by
the Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Salisbury College in
2001 and updated again this year, examines the effects of restrictive residency
requirements for college students.
"The key question for both of these studies is, are there different
residential barriers for students than other voters?" says Dr. Michael
O'Louoghlin, associate professor of Political Science at Salisbury and co-author
of the study.
The study concluded that 21 states maintain unfair restrictive laws and
practices with regard to college students, playing a detrimental role in youth
voter turnout.
"If students have unusually high residential barriers to overcome, it's
just one more added thing that will lower voter turnout," O'Loughlin says.
Taking Over the Town
Erecting these barriers to voting isn't always a conscious choice; some
registrars simply don't know the law and are as confused as college students
when it comes to residency regulations.
Others, however, are motivated to stop college students from voting because of a
fear that they will "take over the town." In Williamsburg, for
example, over half the population are college students, making the threat
plausible.
"If you think about it, in a small town, a block of 300 or 400 voters could
change the character of the city council or the mayor's office," O'Loughlin
says.
That's what happened in New Paltz, New York, where 26-year-old Jason West was
elected mayor and recently started marrying gay couples, causing some New
Yorkers to shudder. West campaigned strongly on New Paltz's State University of
New York campus, appealing to young voters who ousted the town's 16-year mayor.
Another argument used to justify banning students from voting in college towns
is their transient lifestyle ��� that they'll simply move away in four years,
leaving behind the polices they help put in place. But, according to the U.S.
Census Bureau, 46% of Americans moved between 1995 and 2000; in other words,
nearly half of the American public are as transient as college students. What's
more, many states allow homeless people to vote and Virginia allows the homeless
to vote "wherever they lay their head at night."
These flimsy excuses only help to discourage political participation in a
country where the youth vote is already alarmingly low.
"If voters get rebuffed the first time they go vote, they might just say,
'The heck with it,'" says Kent Willis, associate director of the Voting
Rights Project of the ACLU. "When election officials tell a student who is
claimed as a dependent on his dad's taxes but has never lived with his dad, to
go vote where his dad lives, students know they are being jerked around."
Yet some people see this type of disenfranchisement doing just the opposite of
discouraging voters.
"It sends a message that there are people who care enough about young
people voting to prevent it from happening," says Hans Reimer, Washington
director of Rock the Vote. "It has an empowering effect ��� if you don't
want me to vote, that's exactly what I'm going to do."
It isn't just local elections that are a concern. The 2004 presidential
elections loom large in people's minds.
"This election is going to be so close," says Reimer. "Because of
that, the pressure to disenfranchise voters will be heightened. We can see the
scenarios happening where local election boards, often not operating in the best
interest of democracy, decide for partisan reasons to block votes."
I Want My Democracy
Students and voting rights organizations aren't taking their chances, and are
pouring time and resources into fighting young voter disenfranchisement.
Rock the Vote is circulating a petition against voter suppression to send to the
secretaries of state in all 50 states, asking for a detailed game plan to tackle
the problem by July. They're also forming a coalition with organizations such as
National Voice, Just Democracy, One Student, One Vote, and the New Voters
Project to help give the issue national attention.
The Election Assistance Commission, in charge of administering the slippery Help
America Vote Act ��� legislation that will require voters to present valid I.D.s
at the polls ��� says they are dispensing $750,000 into a program dedicated to
engaging college students in the electoral process ("If you can think of a
hip hop name or a Beyonce name for the program, let me know," says Chairman
DeForester B. Soaries Jr.)
Luther Lowe from William and Mary is in the process of creating a national
organization called Suffrage Now to act as a watchdog for student voting rights,
and Peter Maybarduk recently created a listserv called Student Vote, where
students can post specific cases of voter disenfranchisement at [email protected].
Finally, on Tuesday, May 11, the 30 Somethings Working Group, a group of 14
Democratic members of the House of Representatives under the age of 40, took to
the House floor to talk about young voter suppression. Students can e-mail the
group with incidents of voter suppression at [email protected].
With all this action, students are showing that they're not just going out to
vote, they're going out to change the country.
"This needs to be an issue that is part of the public discourse and people
need to realize that this is a constitutional problem that needs to be
resolved," Lowe said. "If we can do this, we can really change the
makeup of local governments across the United States."
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