POSTED BY MARTIN KICH
This is from the Daily Kos’s Elections Update daily newsletter:
Democratic students at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University have filed a federal lawsuit against Republican Secretary of State Ruth Johnson over a state election law that requires voters to register at the address on their driver’s license, even if that address doesn’t match their residence at school. The law also requires those who register by mail or through a third-party voter registration drive to cast their first ballot in-person instead of by absentee.
These measures effectively force in-state students to either take extra time to update their licenses or travel home on Election Day to vote. Furthemore, students are disproportionately likely to register through the mail or campus registration drives. Consequently, the combination of these two provisions appears to be unconstitutional, since the Supreme Court ruled in a 1979 case that college students have the right to vote at their school or at their parents’ permanent address.
Particularly telling is the naked partisan self-interest on the part the law’s author. In 1999, then-state Sen. Mike Rogers and his fellow Republicans passed this law, even though the plaintiffs contend that lawmakers were well aware of the problems it would cause for student voters.
Yet after enacting the measure, Rogers ran for Congress in a swingy Democratic-held House district home to the state capital of Lansing … and Michigan State University, which at the time enrolled more than 43,000students, 90 percent of whom were from Michigan. Rogers won by just 111 votes over his Democratic rival that year, meaning his own voter suppression law may have very well made the difference.
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I agree that the provision requiring registrants to cast their first ballot in person effectively puts a burden on college students registered in their home districts and precincts. But it is also “blatantly partisan” by “Progressives” to want college students to vote in their college precinct rather than in their home precincts. In my first election in 1964, I was in college in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana but voted absentee ballot in my home precinct in Logan County, Arkansas. All it took was a little planning ahead.
Since 1964 State legislatures have been very busy making absentee voting harder to acquire, sometimes by making the office hours for in person registration shorter or the time before the election to register shorter. And do not forget to send in your voter ID. Nothing is as it was and voter registration has been impaired in subtle ways. These “inconveniences” are planned, purposeful and aimed at removing the possibility of easy access to voting for specific sections of the population that might cause a problem for the emerging far right.