Thread by @DemocracyDocket

🎓THREAD: College students make up nearly 20 million eligible voters across the country and are often the target of voter suppression, especially students who move to another state for school. Let’s break down the ins and outs of student voting⤵️

✅Starting with the basics: College students can register to vote using their campus address. In 1979, #SCOTUS affirmed in Symm v. United States that blocking college students from using their school address to register to vote violated the 26th Amendment.

The 26th Amendment, ratified in 1971, lowered the federal voting age to 18 and prohibited voter discrimination based on age. Voting laws targeting college students usually incorporate some aspect of age, so Symm fell under the 26th.🗳

Another #SCOTUS case is Dunn v. Blumstein (1972), which ruled that living in a place for 30 days was enough to establish residency for voting. Some states, like New Hampshire, have no length of residency requirement to vote. As soon as you move to NH, you can register to vote.🏡

To be clear—College students CAN register to vote using their college addresses and states CANNOT require someone to live in the state for more than 30 days before registering to vote.☺️

Some people may claim that out-of-state students shouldn’t vote in their college town because they aren’t “permanent” residents. But here’s a secret: states count out-of-state students as part of their permanent population.🤫

Every 10 years, the U.S. counts its population via the Census. College students are counted using their campus address—not their home address. For example, the writer of this thread is from Texas and went to school in New York. In the 2020 Census, I was counted in NY—not TX.

Students are counted at their campus address because it’s recognized that the student population is important to a neighborhood, city, and state and affects how decisions are made. And states benefit from counting their student populations!

By counting out-of-state students in the Census, states increase their population and share of political and congressional power. The Census determines billions in funding and congressional apportionment—by counting students, states can get more.👀

If states have a political interest in students for funding and representation, why shouldn’t students have a political interest in the state? Students care about the communities they live in, even if they did not grow up there.🏘

States can also make it difficult to request absentee ballots for young voters, making registering in your college town more attractive. A few examples...

Tennessee requires new voters to vote in-person to “establish identity” before requesting an absentee ballot. For a TN student whose county doesn’t have an election between their 18th birthday and when they move for school, it can make getting an absentee ballot impossible.✉️

Some states require absentee ballots to be notarized or witnessed by voters from the same state. This places additional burdens on absentee voters, especially for students at schools where notaries aren’t easily accessible or there aren’t many voters from their state on campus.

Delays in the USPS have made it harder for ballot applications and ballots to be sent and received on time. With no guarantees that mail ballots will be delivered on time to be counted, voting locally is sometimes a better option for students.📫

Students live and work in their college town for 4 years, so they deserve the option to make their voices heard. No one would deny an adult’s right to vote if they move to a new city, visit their family in a hometown, and move again 4 years later. So why challenge a student’s?

To be clear—students do NOT vote in both their home and college towns. While students can maintain residencies at both addresses, they can only vote ONCE. That's why many students choose to register at school—it would be burdensome to travel allll the way home to cast a ballot.

Issues in student voting recently arose when New Hampshire Republicans proposed #HB429. The law would require students at public institutions to receive in-state tuition to register to vote using a campus address and remove student ID cards as valid forms of voter ID.

There are big issues with #HB429:
❌It’s hard to establish residency for in-state tuition
❌It creates a financial incentive for schools to NOT encourage voting for fear of losing $ w/ more in-state students
❌For many w/o a license/passport, a student ID is the only ID they have

To establish residency for in-state tuition in NH, an adult must live in NH for 12 continuous months for a reason other than school and provide documentation proving residency. No out-of-state student would be able to meet this standard without an interruption in their education.

#HB429 basically requires college voters to live in New Hampshire for at least a year before registering, in conflict with NH’s own durational residency guidelines and Dunn v. Blumstein’s 30-day residency ruling. This policy proposal is unfair and discriminatory to young voters.

Laws that force student voters to sit out of elections hurt our democracy long-term. Data shows that the younger someone starts voting, the more likely they are to be civically engaged as adults. Nevertheless, the GOP continues its war on the #youthvote. circle.tufts.edu/latest-researc…

Bills like New Hampshire's #HB429 arbitrarily disenfranchise voters. NH Republicans aren't alone in attacking student voting rights—state Republicans across the country are following suit. Help us track other restrictive efforts aimed at young voters⤵️ democracydocket.com/voter-suppress…

The #youthvote TERRIFIES the GOP. Why? Because the student voter bloc tends to vote Democrat. That's why Republicans propose and pass new voting laws every year to keep students far away from the ballot box. These legislative efforts are voter suppression by design. Period.