Students Fight Back Against Voter ID Law That Allows Gun Licenses But Bans Student IDs

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Students Fight Back Against Voter ID Law That Allows Gun Licenses But Bans Student IDs

by Kira Lerner at Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/03/17/3634295/tennessee-voting-rights-lawsuit/

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Under Tennessee law, a handgun carry permit can be used as ID when casting a ballot, but a student ID card cannot. The state also includes college and university faculty ID cards as acceptable forms of ID even though they are nearly identical to student IDs cards.

Voter ID measures, which are currently enforced in 31 states across the country, have disproportionately blocked young minorities from casting ballots. Most efforts to overturn the laws have been led by civil rights and voting rights advocates, but in Tennessee, a group of students decided to take a stand this month and are leading the charge against their state’s discriminatory law.

“If [voter ID laws] are going to exist, we want the broadest ID list possible,” Jon Sherman, a staff attorney with the Fair Elections Legal Network, told ThinkProgress. “Picking and choosing between different forms of perfectly valid and secure IDs is an effort to skew the electorate.”

The Nashville Student Organizing Committee and a group of nine students from Fisk University and Tennessee State University, both historically black colleges, filed a lawsuit in early March against the state, alleging that excluding student IDs from the acceptable voter ID list violates the 26th Amendment, which enshrines the right to vote to qualified citizens 18 years of age and older, as well as the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. They also say the state does not allow voters to present out-of-state ID cards, which are widely held by college students living in Tennessee, therefore discriminating against out-of-state students.


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