It would be fairly easy to refute such a claim; the Supreme Court ruled in Symm v. United states that state laws creating a barrier against students voting in the states they go to school were unconstitutional, and Iowa itself makes it clear that out-of-state students at Iowa universities and colleges may vote in their Iowa college town:
Non-Iowa Resident Attending College IN Iowa
If you are from another state (i.e. Illinois) and are attending college in Iowa (i.e. Iowa State University), you may register to vote in:
* your Iowa college town or
* your home state (hometown) and vote absentee
(You cannot register to vote in both locations)
It is quite unambiguously clear that it is legal for out-of-state students to vote in Iowa. However, while that question has been raised, the comment I quoted at the beginning of this diary raised an important and different question: Is it ethical?
Perhaps the reason why there has been such a divide here on Daily Kos about this issue is that those who are raising the question believe it to be a question of ethics, and we have been answering it with demonstrations of legality. It is evident that what is legal does not always coincide with what is ethical. We all know that slavery was once legal, and we all would agree that it is not and has never been ethical. Therefore, in order to answer the question of ethics, we must look much further into the issue than mere quotes of court rulings and law; we must look at the history of campus voting and the laws that protect it.
Until 1970, most college students were disenfranchised entirely. The voting age for the first 194 years of the republic was 21. The Voting Rights Act amendment of 1970 lowered the voting age for the first time to 18, suddenly allowing a huge population of young adults a voice in their federal government. In 1971, the 26th Amendment provided that:
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.
However, it is important to note that the history of young-adult suffrage is inextricably tied to the history of minority suffrage through the Voting Rights Act. As we will discover, the tactics used to intimidate and suppress out-of-state student voters bear a striking similarity to the tactics used in an earlier era to intimidate and suppress minority voters.
Let us look back, for a moment, at the Jim Crow era of overt minority voter disenfranchisement. Even at that time, it was not generally legal to deny suffrage purely on the basis of race. This of course did not deter the Ku Klux Klan from illegal voter suppression and acts of violence, but such acts were not sufficient to deter black citizens from exercising their rights.
In order to maintain what they considered an acceptable level of black voter suppression, the racists turned to ostensibly legal methods of suppression, based on discrimination against things black voters had in common. Many were illiterate and most were very poor. Literacy tests and poll taxes, therefore, produced very high levels of selective black voter suppression, and when combined with grandfather clauses, allowing illiterate people whose grandfathers had voted to vote, had only a minimal impact on the white vote.
Now, let us look forward to the time shortly after young adult suffrage was granted. It is my intent to show that barriers to college students voting where they go to school were erected out of both a desire to suppress the youth vote and racist and nativist prejudice.
Imagine, if you will, that you are a middle-aged Vietnam War supporter in the early 1970s. You are frightened by the growing liberalism of the youth movement and the effect that it will have on the upcoming elections, given the new protections of universal young adult suffrage. What can you do to minimize the potential impact of the youth vote? Like the Southern governments of the Jim Crow era, you start to look at what young voters have in common. Therefore, let us look at young likely liberal voters of the '70s.
- They are transient. In the '60s and '70s, increasing mobility and the rise of the mass media created vast amounts of migration by youth, and particularly by the most visible and frightening hippie and social liberal segment of the youth population. Many young people still remain at home working for their parents or local businesses like their parents had done, but this segment of the youth population is neither politically active nor frightening.
- They are college students. Students were the least transient and most politically active, and therefore presumably the most likely to vote and least likely to face existing barriers to doing so, as they had a fixed address and predictable schedule. This proved true and continues even today; students are much more likely to vote than their non-college-going peers.
Given those two qualities, the best way to suppress the liberal youth vote would be to keep students from voting where they go to school. After all, most elections are held while school is in session, and absentee voting was even more difficult then than it is now.
Now, suppose you are a white middle-aged resident of a college town somewhere in the Southwest in the early '70s. Your town is primarily white, but it's the site of a historically black college populated almost entirely by students from other states or other regions of your state. Until now, most students could not vote in your local elections, which had effectively meant that there was very little influence on your town by its black residents. However, all of a sudden, now they can vote!
How do you prevent them from influencing your local politics without discriminating against them on the basis of race or age? Again, the answer becomes clear: keep students from voting where they go to school.
This second scenario isn't limited to the '70s, either; it has hapened much more recently.
In Texas, students at the predominantly black Prairie View A&M University were threatened with arrest by the local district attorney, a Republican, who suggested they were not eligible to vote in the county in which the school was located. This was nonsense. Students can vote in their college towns if they designate the campus as their home address. The whole point, of course, was intimidation. The threat of arrest is an excellent way of deterring someone from voting.
This racist and anti-liberal policy of deterring student voting continues even today, with the objective (and effect) of 1: suppressing the youth vote entirely, 2: suppressing the liberal vote in conservative districts, and 3: suppressing the minority vote in white districts, confining both the liberal vote and the minority vote to their originating, gerrymandered, concentrated-liberal and majority-minority districts.
The Student Voting Rights Campaign is an organization to protect the voting rights of students. Right on their front page is a question addressing this very issue, one which they seem to consider of paramount importance to the student suffrage cause:
Have you been denied the right to vote in your college town? You're not alone. Click here to be added to our national database of students.
Reading their front page feature article, we discover why:
November 01st, 2004
Protest!
STUDENTS WANT TO VOTE
But Will Registrars Let Them?
Outdated elections laws and anti-student registrars prevented hundreds, possibly thousands from eligible student voters from participating in today’s Gubernatorial election.
"Virginia students want to vote," said Harrison Godfrey, of the Student Voting Rights Campaign at William & Mary, "It’s unfortunate that in many Virginia cities, the registrars won’t let them."
At issue is the right of students who live on campus to register to vote at their campus address. Although federal law allows students to register and vote at their campus address, Virginia election law allows individual registrars to block those registrations. Although most Virginia registrars allow students to register to vote wherever they choose, a small handful do not, suppressing legitimate student voter turnout.
But wait! It gets worse:
Tracy Howard, the Radford city registrar, denied all registrations from students who registered to vote at their dorm address unless they completed a confusing postcard asking students to re-state their legal address. The postcard’s language implies that the students’ dorm address is not a valid address.
Similarly, the Norfolk city registrar sent to dorm registrants a "voter residency application" with eleven questions that had no relevance to determining a students’ eligibility to vote.
"These and other, similar tactics are nothing more than modern-day Jim Crowe citizenship tests," said Lowe, also the William & Mary Student Senate Chairman, "It’s unbelievable that the State of Virginia allows this to go on."
Yes, it is unbelievable. But it's true. It happens. And no, it is not ethical. In fact, it is so unethical, and so troubling, that a lawyer named Patrick J. Troy has written a 27-page treatise discussing the issue of student voter disenfranchisement and the effect of these discriminatory policies have on young voter turnout, which I will leave you to peruse at your leisure.
And it was not unethical, in the light of this appalling voter suppression effort, for Barack Obama to remind legal student voters in Iowa that they were eligible to vote there. Nor was it unethical for me to defend his doing so. What was unethical was our other candidates' choice to take a stand on the side of the racist, anti-liberal, anti-Democratic groups who wish to prevent students from voting where they go to school.
I will close with my allegedly unethical comment that spawned this whole discussion:
Yes, it IS the right thing!
Here you've got several thousand people who live in Iowa who will be out of state on caucus day.
If the caucus were held on the normal date, they'd all be in-state like they will be for the general election. But it's early, so most of them will be visiting their families for the holidays (just like lots of regular non-student Iowans).
But the caucus is early this year. So Obama printed a GOTV pamphlet reminding these legal Iowa voters that they may caucus in Iowa. And I don't know where the busing allegations are coming from, but if he is busing them, he is busing legal Iowa voters to their caucuses.
