The New Hampshire state legislature last month introduced a bill that would prevent college students in the state from voting there unless they were residents before enrolling. New Hampshire law currently allows college students to choose either their home address or their local address as their permanent residence. Thus, college students in New Hampshire, like those in Massachusetts, can choose to vote either in their home or college state.
The Daily objects to the proposal — which was introduced by State Rep. Gregory Sorg — on several dimensions, not least that it may be a transparent attempt by Republican lawmakers to disenfranchise a liberal-leaning bloc of voters in the months leading up to the presidential election.
Though there is no evidence that the timing of the bill to coincide with next year's presidential election is anything more than a coincidence, House Speaker William O'Brien has made statements which call into question the state legislature's ability to be objective on the matter. College students, O'Brien said, are "basically doing what I did when I was a kid and foolish, and voting as a liberal." O'Brien's political motivation is hard to ignore. Sorg insisted that his proposed legislation wasn't politically motivated, but at the very least, it is certainly misguided.
"Even if [college students] voted the way that I wanted them to," Sorg said, "I would not want them to be voting because they would cancel out the votes of the residents of the town who have a stake in the future."
Sorg's assertion that college students have no stake in the governance of their college towns is without merit. A student in New Hampshire originally from Iowa rents and — at least indirectly — pays property taxes in New Hampshire. Even students who live on campus are affected by local property taxes because the tax rate affects how much the university charges for housing. In fact, she is subject to nearly all of the laws that govern the state of New Hampshire. Everything from her employment, her income tax and her access to health care to the quality of services she relies upon on a daily basis is subject to the will of her local representatives.
The proposed law states that in order to register to vote in New Hampshire, residents must have "indefinite" plans to live in the state. But forcing students to vote in their home state doesn't correct this issue, since most students do not have "indefinite" plans to live in their home state either. Instead, it will make New Hampshire college students less likely to vote altogether; students are much more likely to walk over to the local high school than they are to apply for and mail an absentee ballot from their home state.
Furthermore, the standard for residency outlined in the proposal would mean that anyone who comes to New Hampshire to work a job he or she knew were temporary, including those in the military, would be denied voting rights, in spite of the fact that he or she were paying taxes in New Hampshire. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down this standard in 1972, when it ruled that the town of Hanover, N.H. could not prevent a Dartmouth College student from voting there despite the fact that he was originally from Hawaii and planned to leave New Hampshire after graduating.
Sorg's proposal appears to violate the spirit of the 1972 ruling. There is no need to ensure that anyone who votes in a state intends to live there permanently because when they establish residency elsewhere they leave their voting rights behind as well. There's no need to deny them voting rights to begin with.
It is nevertheless important to remember that the demographics of New Hampshire differ vastly from Massachusetts, where the bulk of the universities are located in major cities like Boston and Cambridge. Tufts, for example, has about 5,000 undergraduates, while Medford and Somerville have more than 50,000 residents each. Dartmouth, on the other hand, a college of just over 4,000, is in Hanover, N.H., a town of barely 10,000 residents. This makes towns like Hanover disproportionately vulnerable to the will of college students, and it is easy to see why these demographics would be irksome to the towns' other residents.
But their chagrin does not excuse denying college students the right to equal representation. Like permanent residents, they rely on local government resources like infrastructure, law enforcement and emergency room care. To deny them their say over who allocates those resources is not acceptable.
