College Students Still Face Voting Stumbling Blocks

[Purveyor]

It's a quadrennial issue. Every presidential election finds college students wading through a swamp of murky laws and logistical hurdles to get into the polling booths. But this year, amid record interest — and primary turnout — among college students, experts say many campus precincts are sorely unprepared to meet student demand. And laws passed after the 2004 election, ostensibly to clamp down on voter fraud, could cause a slew of new problems that disproportionately hit student voters. Which means the question in 2008 isn't will the young voters deliver. "It's can the young voters deliver?," says Matthew Segal, executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment.

The most glaring problems come from lack of preparation. Segal fears not much has changed since, as a freshman at Kenyon College in closely contested Ohio in 2004, he manned the 10-hour polling lines on campus, dispensing water, pizza and umbrellas to the stalwarts who stuck around in the rain to cast their votes. To him, the inadequate planning was obvious: registration had surged since 2000, he notes, but the campus precinct had been allocated no additional voting machines. That left two machines for 1,300 voters. "The media angle was, aren't these young kids heroic to have stood in line all day," he says. "Rather than, there's something inherently wrong in the first place."

Kenyon has now upped its number of voting machines to 10, but other precincts admit they're still basing their Election Day plans on where the voting rolls stood in August, long before student voter drives even started, let alone achieved record successes. To accommodate the swollen voting rolls, many understaffed offices will have to hire temps or new employees who are less familiar with standard procedures and may be more prone to making mistakes.

Because local officials have wide latitude in interpreting election laws that vary from state to state, misunderstandings — or misinformation — could have a greater impact this year, given the anticipated bulge in student turnout. Most of the trouble comes from nailing down where college students should be counted as residents if they go to school in one state but go home to another on holidays. The Supreme Court's position is clear: a 1979 ruling found that all students have the right to vote where they attend college. But local officials often make students travel a rocky road. In recent months, registrars in counties including Montgomery, Va. (home to Virginia Tech), Greenville, S.C. (Furman University) and most recently El Paso, Colo. (Colorado College), issued warnings that were off-putting if not outright alarming: students who register in their college town could be ineligible to be claimed as dependents on their parents' tax returns and might be in danger of losing tuition scholarships. The problem, according to youth voter advocates and the IRS, is that these dire warnings are incorrect. After widespread outrage, the registrars backed off. But experts worry that the resulting confusion could sour first-timers on voting altogether. "It's creating somewhat of a chilling effect," says Steve Fenberg, executive director of the youth civic action group New Era Colorado.

Legal misunderstandings are one thing, but some registrars seem to make political decisions about whether students get to vote locally. In Virginia, for example, where the law stipulates that voters must establish "domicile" in their precincts to register but never defines that term, youth voter advocates say it's no accident that registrars' rulings are often strictest in small towns where students could potentially swing a local election. In 2004, after a voter drive registered 2,000 William and Mary students in Williamsburg — home to fewer than 12,000 residents — the local registrar announced that students no longer had domicile and could not vote there. "If you're a homeless person, you're allowed to write down the landmarks that you live around," says Zach Pilchen, President of College Democrats at William and Mary, pointing to a space on Virginia's form reserved for that purpose. "But you can't register from a dormitory." Win Sowder, who took over as Williamsburg's registrar in 2007, says her office no longer asks about domicile or restricts student voting.

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TIME: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1849906,00.html?xid=feed-rss-netzero

[Captain Hilts]

1. I registered at home, in VA and voted absentee from Canada 4 years.

In a lot of cases, students would be better off voting in their home states and voting early or absentee.