Student Voting

2008-09-22

At Virginia Tech University recently, the Presidential election of 2008 quietly got potentially notorious. Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” machine arrived on campus and thousands of students were registering to vote. Obama, who is very popular amongst the young, “post-racial” generation in America, was working his magic of getting young people interested in politics again. The same magic he demonstrated during the primaries through the use of social networking sites such as Facebook to reach the unreachable voters, was working again. This was Virginia too so it again caught everyone’s attention.

But, in the midst of the Obama campaign’s work, the ghosts of the stolen election of 2000 arrived again. I am not talking hanging chads or swinging doors either.  It seems students at Virginia Tech received notice that essentially stated the following:  register at your college in Virginia at your own peril, you might not be able to finish college.

This came from Randy Wertz, en electoral registrar in the state, who was interpreting state law in a manner that strongly suggested to some that they had better think twice before they register to vote in the commonwealth. Wertz’s notice suggested to students that they might lose their financial aid or scholarship by registering in Virginia to vote. Misinformation regarding tax status and health insurance coverage of students also trickled out and soon mass panic was brewing.

It was all, of course, electoral madness. But it was enough to get the conspiracy theorists out of their bunkers ready to charge the Republicans with dirty tricks long before the election has arrived.
Sujatha Jahagirdar, of the Public Interest Research Group’s New Voters Project was one of the most widely quoted experts on the fracas. Her words became the gospel on every blog in the nation trying to clear up the craziness:

“In 25 years of registering young voters around the country, none of the staff has ever heard of a single incident where a student has lost their tax status or their scholarship because of where they’ve registered to vote.”

This about summed it up because once the panic began Wertz issued another edict that basically advised students they had nothing to worry about; they could register to vote in Virginia and they would not be rendered a pauper.

Unfounded fears surrounding student voter registration have been a problem for decades.  What has been mistaken for student apathy in voting is in fact, most likely reluctance to participate because of those fears. The most common false is that by registering to vote in one state - while your permanent address is in another - qualifies a student as financially independent from parents who write off college expenses on their taxes.  Or that, by registering in the state where you go to school, you disqualify yourself from financial aid offered only to legal residents of your home state.

Both are false.

The Brennan Center in New York City is taking student voting serious across the nation. On their web page http://www.brennancenter.org/studentvoting, students can check to see the requirements for registration in every state around the country.

Others are also on top of the issue.

Katie Naranjo of College Democrats of America, writing in the Huffington Post, calls voter suppression of student votes, “a major hurdle,” and cites Voter ID laws as a problem as well. Others have described the young vote as “critical” to the election result.

Of course, we know why this is important. Barack Obama is hugely popular amongst young voters, the group most likely to include many students. His presence in the primary helped bring out 6.5 million new Democratic voters. In nearly every state in the Democratic primary season, Obama crushed Hillary Clinton as well. In some states, young people voted from him 3 to 1 over Hillary Clinton and even in the states where she succeeded, she barely surpassed Barack Obama. And as for the issue of education, a recent Gallup poll reports that Obama is favored over John McCain on education issues by a wide margin. In other words, young people might be the decisive voter group unless they don’t vote or are denied the right to vote.

All of this lends itself to one very important task for anyone interested in real change: if you see a young person and/or a student, ask them politely without sounding like their parent, have you registered to vote? Better yet, tell them to log onto the Brennan Center site on voting and read for themselves what they should be doing.

Brian Gilmore is a public interest lawyer and Washington D.C. based writer. He covers law and books for EbonyJet.com