Students at Elizabeth City State University in Pasquotank County, North Carolina,
protest efforts to keep them from voting last year.
If you can be drafted at 18, be sent overseas to kill and die for your country, you should be able to cast a ballot. That rationale got the voting age in the United States lowered from 21 to 18 in 1971 when the 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. And ever since, despite a Supreme Court ruling in 1979, many county registrars have been doing their best, sometimes illegally, to block one subset of young voters from casting ballots by keeping students from registering and voting in the towns and cities where they attend college.
Voter suppression has been going on this year in North Carolina where early voting started Thursday. County election officials eliminated North Carolina State University’s early voting site. Since then, the Republican-dominated North Carolina State Board of Elections has been trying to pull an early voting location from the 18,000-student Appalachian State University:
Last week, the board filed a petition asking the state Supreme Court to stay a judge's ruling in favor of the site. On Wednesday afternoon, not having heard from the high court and with the start of early voting looming, the elections board hastily voted to keep the site on campus. Soon after, the state Supreme Court announced that it was staying the judge's ruling and sending the case back to the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
With just hours until voting began, an elections board spokesman told the Associated Press late Wednesday that the on-campus voting site would stand. But the battle over early voting in the state continues.
Last year, the board of elections in North Carolina's Pasquotank County, home to Elizabeth City State University, a historically black university, tried to keep an ECSU student off the candidate list for city council based on a bogus claim that he didn't meet the residency requirement. He managed to get on the ballot anyway, but that didn't stop mostly white county officials efforts to silence many student voters by turning them away from the polls based on a pinched interpretation of what qualified as proof of residency.
Suppressing the student vote is not confined to just one method. Efforts include making utterly false claims of consequences befalling students who register to vote at their college address. Across the country, as in Pasquotank County, county registrars have illegally—that is, unconstitutionally—refused to accept dormitories as legal addresses for the purpose of voting. Eleven years ago, the district attorney of Waller County, Texas, wrote an op-ed column in a local newspaper in which he threatened to prosecute students at the traditionally black Prairie View A&M for illegal voting. He backed off when a lawsuit was threatened. It had been voter suppression more than three decades ago at Prairie View that spurred the Supreme Court to uphold students’ rights to vote at their college address in Symm v. U.S.
In spite of that ruling, however, some officials still try to argue that when students vote at their college address they are committing a kind of fraud because they have no stake in the local community. This is nonsense, as Heather Smith, then executive director of Rock the Vote, stated in 2007:
"Students go to a college or university for 4 or 5 years and many stay on in those communities afterwards. They pay sales tax, many work full or part-time jobs and pay income tax, and they are subject to the laws of the community in which they live; they have every right to vote in that community, legally and morally.”
Young people, including students, are not second-class citizens. And officials and partisans who treat them that way when they seek to exercise their constitutional rights ought to face public disdain. And legal action.
Please help protect the vote for all and give $3 to Daily Kos-endorsed secretary of state candidates.
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smiley7 has a diary up on the subject here.