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

[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.