My brother, Justin, moved to Virginia less than a year ago but he’s still registered to vote in our home state of Connecticut. Over the last week, I have been reminding him to transfer his registration so that he can vote at the polls on November 4th, especially since he’s in a state that hasn’t been color coded as blue or red just yet.
For those of us who have registered in our home states, the idea of transferring your registration can easily slip your mind because hey, you already registered, right? Of course there’s always absentee voting but as someone who had to cast her first presidential vote with a stamp in 2004, I can attest that it leaves a lot to be desired. For instance, half a million absentee ballots were rejected in 2004, due to various technicalities, according to Network of Citizens, a non-profit dedicated to ensuring accuracy when the votes get counted. Technicalities could include coffee stains, stray pen marks or a signature that doesn’t look exactly like the one on file.
At the time of my absentee vote, I was a student at the University of Maryland. I took a picture of myself checking the box that was next to the name of my first presidential vote, picked my local representatives and then sealed and stamped the envelope. No lines buzzing with energy, no curtain, no neat lever thingy to pull and most disappointingly, no “I voted today” sticker. (Though my friend Sean later snagged me one from his polling place because I was just that bummed about it.) It never occurred to me to try to register in Maryland. But students who do try to vote using their campus address are often discouraged, intimidated or flat out disqualified by the requirements.
A lot of states require voters to produce a local driver’s license and a utility bill with their name on it, two things that most out-of-state college students do not have. In 2004, posters were distributed on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus claiming that out-of-state students who voted in Pennsylvania would give up access to certain financial aid programs and their non-Pennsylvania licenses as well as falsely threatening that they might be required to pay extra state taxes. Most recently, students at Virginia Tech (in a state where young, typically liberal voters could sway the vote) received a statement from the election registrar saying that voting in Virginia would officially establish residency and affect financial aid, tax filings, drivers licenses and car registrations.
But this is also an issue that affects in-state students who might live far from their hometown precincts and do not have a car on campus or the means to get home on a Tuesday to cast their vote. The Maryland Board of Elections website states, “As a student, you may register at your school address only if you consider this address to be your ‘official’ or ‘permanent’ home. That is, if you do not consider your parent’s home to be your home and do not intend to return there after school, your school address may be your residence.” Hmm… so an out-of-state freshman has to decide that they won’t return home in 4 years? And in-state students have to say that their parent’s house is not “home” but rather their cramped single-turned-into-a-double in Carroll Hall is? They go on to warn that you should check your financial aid status, which could be altered by registering. What’s interesting, however, is that while the state of Maryland allows students to declare their campus address “permanent” for voting purposes, that same official change of residency is not valid for qualification of in-state tuition if a student is still financially dependent on a non-Maryland resident.
There have also been allegations from voting rights organizations such as the Right to Vote program at the Center for Voting and Democracy that polling places located in college towns are intentionally denied the resources to handle the appropriate volume of voters which causes discouraging and impractical wait times. At the University of Maryland in 2006, the precinct at the STAMP Student Union had only four machines, forcing students to stand in line for up to four hours. While the precinct off campus, that was used by community members and professors had 12 machines and no backups. In 2004, students at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio reported waiting in line for up to ten hours.
Dan Shults, a MaryPIRG (Public Interest Research Groups) coordinator on UMD’s College Park campus said that they are thinking of ways to keep the students in line, no matter how long it takes this year. “We've talked about having music or some other sort of entertainment,” he said. It cannot be determined if precincts in college towns are intentionally given insufficient equipment but the press release for last week’s Congressional hearing on “Ensuring the Rights of College Students to Vote“ speculated that youth apathy stereotypes might lead some elected officials to ignore or under serve precincts in college towns because they assume that the turnout will be low.
Adam Tiehen attended the hearing along with 30 other students as a member of The New Voter’s Project, a nationwide initiative of all the Student PIRGs. “It is criminal what has been happening in voter registrar offices across the country, but I must say that I was comforted to know that there are advocates in Washington for us students. Each speaker at the hearing did a phenomenal job of addressing the issue and I think it put a smile on everyone's face to see that there are people fighting for our voting rights. The truth is though, that if the people who are allowing these activities to continue are not punished, whether criminally or otherwise, they will simply continue cheating young citizens out of their right to vote,” he said.
But it won’t matter much if your campus has plenty of voting machines if you aren’t registered. Go to www.declareyourself.com and take five minutes to fill out your info, print the forms and send them in before the deadline. Residents of Virginia and D.C. have exactly one week to register until the October 6th cut off and Marylanders have a bit more time, with an October 14th deadline.