As an American, one would expect that it would be beneficial to give more people the chance to exercise their right to vote by allowing early voting for students on college campuses. Getting more young people involved in the political process would seem like a smart idea, right?
Well, it does unless you're a part of the Republican Party, specifically the Indiana Republican Party, whose members pushed to have our early voting request shot down by the county election board on Tuesday.
The backstory is this: Our university does not allow for early voting for college students, something that universities like Indiana, Purdue and Indiana State all allow. Of course, this hinders voter turnout, because college students really don't like to wait in line for hours on Election Day, so they just stay home.
More after the jump.
The county election board took up the issue this past Tuesday to determine whether or not to allow early voting. The same day, the president of the University Democrats and the College Republicans signed off together on an Op-Ed that ran in the campus newspaper endorsing the idea in a bipartisan fashion, saying it would help our democracy to increase turnout, and invited everyone to the county election board meeting to show their support for the idea.
The county election board consists of three members who must agree unanimously on the issue in order to pass the resolution. This becomes important later.
Later that day, the meeting rolls around, and of course the University Democrat president, along with a few other members show up for the meeting. How many members show up from the College Republicans? One -- the treasurer, who actually goes up and speaks out against allowing early voting.
In the end, the election board, consisting of two Democrats and one Republican, are at a 2-1 decision in favor of early voting. Take a guess who stalled it, saying it would cost too much and there's not enough time to fix the logistics. Both arguments were shot down quickly as a) to her credit, the university president and the Student Government Association president vowed to pay for the costs themselves and b) we have two months until Election Day, but stalling the process only creates less time to get everything ready. In addition, the chairwoman of the county Republican Party says that the students, in effect, aren't smart enough to vote, claiming their votes can be easily bought and bribed by something so simple as offering free hot dogs.
In the end, the meeting was adjourned and will reconvene next week to decide the fate of early voting on my campus. After the meeting, the College Republican treasurer came up to the University Democrat president and told him he shouldn't have included their name on the Op-Ed in support of early voting, in effect saying the College Republican president doesn't speak for the College Republicans. Funny, right?
The next day (yesterday), the College Republican president has an Op-Ed published reneging on his support, saying he shouldn't have volunteered the entire organization to be involved in pushing what was then a bipartisan effort. I was also informed yesterday that the state Republican party has been in touch with them about this particular issue, and is pushing to have the effort turned down.
To me, the reason to not support the resolution is obvious for them. The goal is to carve the electorate once again. By allowing early voting, you make it easier for young voters to vote. Now take a guess at who they're more likely to support. Why would people rooting for John McCain, Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, etc want to push for allowing more people to vote when they'll vote against them?
This goes right along with a narrative that the party's engaged in on a national level for some time. Just recently they've engaged in various underhanded tactics like voter caging. The Indiana state legislature recently got permission from the Supreme Court to engage in more disenfranchisement by allowing the Voter ID Act to stand, which will disfranchise many young and elderly voters who do not possess the identification necessary, and do not have the means to obtain it, Both are groups that do not favor the Republican party, as a general rule. The rationale was to "combat fraud," yet they could not find a single instance of voter fraud that the law would prevent.
For being the ones who rail against others for not being patriotic enough, they sure don't like it when we try to improve our democracy by having more people take part in it. Interesting how that works.