College students in Dutchess County, New York successfully stopped an attack on the rights of student voters in their community. Four students from Marist College, Bard College, and the Culinary Institute of America filed a federal class action lawsuit last year to protect their right to vote in the November 2012 general election. The student plaintiffs and those similarly situated were allowed to vote due to a preliminary injunction just before the election, and the parties ended the trial for a permanent injunction last week by agreeing to a settlement in the students’ favor.

The suit stemmed from the Dutchess County Board of Elections’ rejection of about 100 voter registration applications from students. The board rejected them solely because students did not provide the technical name of their dorm or they did not provide a room number along with the correctly listed street and mailing address. Students at Vassar College, also located in the county, are required to provide their dorm name because the campus is split between two election districts.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas issued a preliminary injunction the day before the 2012 election directing the board of elections to register those students. Last week’s settlement allowed the students and the board to avoid a full trial on the merits while protecting students’ access to the ballot box. It benefits future students who want to register in their college community by permanently prohibiting the board of elections from rejecting any student application solely because it lacks a dorm name and room number.

Students at Vassar College are still required to provide their dorm information. This exception will also apply to the other campuses if they are ever split between election districts, but the board of elections would be required to provide notice of the change and give students time to provide that information. 

The quick actions of these students paid off and college students in Dutchess County will be protected from this type of voter suppression. Student voters are an important part of the community, and attempts to silence students in the voting booth need to be shut down as was the case in New York. As Campus Vote Project highlights in the voter registration section of our toolkit, schools can play an important role in learning what election officials need on registration applications and clarifying those requirements for students.

Some members of New Hampshire’s Senate Public and Municipal Affairs Committee are attempting to gut bills designed to minimize the damage done to student voting rights by the last legislature.

HB 595 would stop implementation of phase two of the ID law, which will eliminate college student IDs from the list of acceptable voter IDs if the legislature does not act. A person who lacks an acceptable ID must complete an affidavit in which they affirm their identity before they are allowed to vote and will be investigated by the attorney general if they do not respond to a letter mailed to them after the election. HB 595 would reinstitute the explicit inclusion of college student IDs. The Senate Public and Municipal Affairs Committee passed an amendment to HB 595 that would strike the bill’s express inclusion of student IDs.  

Committee Chair David Boutin argues that student IDs from public universities would fall under "a nondriver's identification card issued by" a "department, agency or office of any state." Supporters of the provision provide no substantive reason why public college IDs cannot therefore be listed explicitly or why the amendment allows local elections officials to determine whether they will accept IDs from private colleges. The inevitable inconsistency that would result from unclear rules and wide discretion for election officials would cause confusion and delays for voters and staff on Election Day.

The Senate committee also sought to weaken HB 119, which passed the House and would eliminate from the voter registration form an incorrect and misleading paragraph linking motor vehicle laws and voter registration. The paragraph was designed to prevent students from registering to vote in their college community.  A Strafford County judge ordered the paragraph removed last year, but HB 119 would prevent taxpayer dollars from being spent on costly court appeals by deleting the language once and for all by statute. The proposed amendment to HB 119 would replace the deleted and unconstitutional paragraph with very similar language that is no less confusing and intimidating but equally incorrect.

These amendments are creating more barriers for students to exercise their rights to vote. We hope that the full Senate will back HB 595 and HB 119 without amendments and reject efforts to reverse the attack on student voting.

This piece originally appeared on the Reboot blog and is re-posted here with their permission. Reboot creates services, programs and policies that change lives. Their teams investigate how people live and what they need, design programs and policies to address these needs, and implement tailored, practical solutions that benefit underserved communities. They have executed projects in a variety of sectors, including agriculture, healthcare, civic media, education, financial inclusion, human rights, non-profit leadership, and technology policy.

Each year, about 60 million people travel to the state of Florida, including one very special subset of visitors: “snowbirds.”

Florida-bound snowbirds are typically retirees from the northeast of the US who spend their winters in search of sunshine and warm weather. With no state income tax requirements, Florida also makes an attractive destination for formal residency, which means snowbirds can vote.

And vote they do.

Similar to older generations in most American states, Florida’s snowbirds are consistent and engaged voters. Turnout for the 2012 presidential election in Martin County, Florida–where Reboot’s elections research team traveled last week–was 78 percent.  Snowbirds like their ballots as much as they do their beaches, apparently.

But for all the influence snowbirds have on local elections here, the most interesting tidbit we learned from the Martin County Supervisor of Elections had nothing to do with snowbirds at all–and everything to do with young voters.

In Florida, 16 year-olds can “pre-register” to vote when they apply for a driver’s license.  Once they turn 18, they are automatically registered to vote with no further paperwork required.  They are also eligible to become poll workers during the interim period, even if they are not yet able to cast a vote. Martin County’s Supervisor Vicki Davis, and her team of elections administrators, takes advantage of this nicely designed quasi-“nudge” in state law.  After a week with her team, we learned just how much this office has invested in future generations of citizens.

Alongside a voter registration drive for those students who were eligible to vote in the 2012 general elections–which resulted in 800 new voters–the elections team launched a “Pledge to Vote” competition among the county’s high schools. The idea came from the office’s Student Advisory Board, which realized it could use the increased awareness of the elections to encourage underage youth to make a “pledge” that they would vote upon becoming eligible.  Schools that generated the most commitments to vote won trophies from the office.

According to Kherri Anderson, the Deputy Supervisor of Elections Outreach, the students observed that, “you can’t make anybody register to vote; but if we pledge, that says we’ll get involved when we are old enough.”

Both young Democrat and young Republican groups at the schools were invited to share their party platforms with their peers, to simulate the political decision-making environment.  Students who volunteered their cell phone numbers received text messages from the elections office with reminders about registration.  On graduation day, inside their diploma covers, the graduates found a voter registration form and an absentee ballot–a not-so-subtle invitation from the Supervisor herself to become civically engaged.

Students were also invited to become pollworkers, which thrilled the crew of regulars, whose average age is 71.  Anderson received phone calls from her (yes, snowbird) pollworkers after the election day, raving about how the young people could set up polling sites much more quickly, and seemed nonplussed by the technological aspects of the voting equipment.  One local professor even offered all of his students a full test grade and 15 points on the final if they agreed to work the polls.

Our takeaway from Martin County this week was a strong reminder of how deep the connection is between the future of American elections and the future of youth civic engagement.  Even though the county experiences among the highest voter turnout rates in the country–thanks largely to the commitment of the snowbirds–Martin County Supervisor of Elections demonstrates a restless dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Vicki and her team say that their legacy in office is to “keep democracy going for the future.” They back up these words with investments in engaging the county’s young people.

Over the past few weeks, our research has revealed just how local our democratic processes are, different in substantial and important ways in each place we have visited.  What emerged anew this week seems refreshingly applicable across state lines: local government, no matter where it is, might find advantage in dislodging just a bit from the needs and habits of today’s more active voting demographics, and act more directly to ignite the civic spirit within tomorrow’s.

Republicans in the Ohio House of Representatives included potentially unconstitutional language in a substitute budget bill designed to make it more difficult for students attending Ohio colleges to vote in their college communities. The language would require any public college or university that issues a letter or utility bill to a student for voter ID purposes to charge that student in-state tuition. Current law allows public colleges to provide to any student a letter with the student’s name and current address that the student can then use as voter ID. Private colleges may issue zero-balance utility bills to students living in residence halls.

The proposed budget language would discourage colleges from issuing voter ID documents to students who moved to Ohio to attend college by threatening schools with the loss of revenue that would result from charging out-of-state students lower in-state tuition rates. Out-of-state students are often the most in need of such documents.

In 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Symm v. United States that discrimination against college students seeking to vote in their college communities is a violation of the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In Ohio, the definition of residency for voting purposes is intentionally distinct from the definition of residency for determining tuition. If the legislature passes this bill and the governor signs it into law, it is very likely to face a court challenge.

The House could vote on the bill as early as tomorrow. This is the proposed language from the substitute budget bill:

(E) The rules of the chancellor for determining student residency shall grant residency status to a student to whom a state institution of higher education issues a letter or utility bill for use as proof that the student is a qualified elector in this state.

Nothing in division (E) of this section shall be used to grant residency to a student for any purpose other than for state subsidy and tuition surcharge purposes.