Student voters

[mmcirvin]

According to this Rolling Stone article, college students are illegally discouraged, impeded or barred outright from voting locally in many places (including Williamsburg, Virginia, where I went to school). This, of course, is enough to prevent most of them from voting at all.

I voted absentee in Fairfax County, Virginia until I had been in graduate school in Massachusetts for a few years and decided to become an official Massachusetts resident. After a while it became a bit absurd, voting for local officials in a place where I only spent a few weeks out of the year. For some reason it never occurred to me that I could have voted in Williamsburg while I was in college there. Evidently that's exactly how the town officials wanted it.

Comments

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

They do encourage students to register and vote in Bloomington, where the student population is nearly equal to the town population (which is interesting since voting is one of the factors considered for establishing residency and lowering tuition); at Chicago, there wasn't any encouragement either way, as far as I could tell; I voted absentee in Brookline because I knew the local politics there better. Of course, it doesn't take much to discourage a college student here from doing anything that involves thinking or work. Sometimes I really miss Chicago.

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

Wow. It's not like that here. I voted in the provincials in my first year, using my dorm address to register. There was no harassment or confusion whatsoever. Of course, I was 22 in first year and hadn't lived at 'home' for 4 years already, but I don't get the impression that it would have been different for anyone else.

I think we even got fliers in our mailboxes encouraging us to register or something like that.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I just read something else about how many millions of ballots are declared "spoiled" and thrown out without counting, and how there is a county-by-county pattern, i.e. certain counties have hardly any spoilage and maintain that low spoilage year after year, while other counties have high spoilage year after year. and that only changes if the demographics change.

combine that with what you mention, plus the way electronic voting has produced bogus numbers in pretty much every election they've been used, PLUS the fact that the federal government is pushing for all states to adopt the `purge voters who might be felons' policy Florida made famous a couple years ago, and I'm sorry to say, it smells like massive vote fraud.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The business with the warning flyers is particularly classic, of a piece with the time-honored practice of spreading flyers around black neighborhoods warning that they'll get you at the polling place for your outstanding parking tickets.

I don't think that all of this crap is part of a single massive vote-fraud conspiracy, but in a way, that just makes it worse.