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.