Election 08: Student voting rights at risk by murky state rules

Time magazine declared 2008 the Year of the Youth Vote, and young voter turnout is indeed skyrocketing: the non-profit group CIRCLE found that 6.5 million people under the age of 30 voted in the 2008 primaries. That boosted the primary turnout rate for youth from 9% in 2000 to 17% in 2008.

But The New York Times reports that murky rules about student registration -- and over-zealous election officials -- threaten to dampen turnout, at least among college students.

As first reported by Inside Higher Ed, a registrar in Montgomery County, Virginia -- following a voter registration drive by Barack Obama's campaign at Virginia Tech -- issued a press release that erroneously warned of dire consequences for student voters:

The releases warned that such students could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents' tax returns, a statement the Internal Revenue Service says is incorrect, and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents' car and health insurance.

After some inquiries from students and parents, and more pointed questions from civil rights lawyers, the state board of elections said Friday that it was "modifying and clarifying" the state guidelines on which the county registrar had based his releases.

But the warnings aren't true, according to experts surveyed by the Times:

"We have been registering young voters for 25 years," [Sujatha Jahagirdar of the New Voters Project] said. "We registered 500,000 young voters in 2004, the majority on college campuses, and we've never heard of a single one who lost health insurance, scholarship or tax status because of where they registered to vote."

In Virginia, the county registrar first issued an alarming release on Aug. 25, and two days later a slightly toned-down version using language taken directly from the state Board of Elections' Web site.

That site says students can determine their legal residence, but advises them to consider certain questions. "Are you claimed as a dependent on your parents' income tax return?" the site asks. "If you are, then their address is probably your legal residence."

The site also tells students to check whether their coverage under their parents' health or automobile insurance, or their scholarship, will be affected by changing their residence. Civil rights lawyers say these guidelines are problematic and could infringe on students' rights.

With the explosion of student voting, this is going to be a growing issue leading up to Election Day, thanks to vaguely-worded state laws on student voting. According to the Times, South Carolina's voter-registration site says students who want to register to vote at their college address must demonstrate "a present intention to remain in the community."

The Times also notes that there's a long history of student voting rights being questioned -- previous controversies came up in Statesboro, Georgia in 2007, and Waller County, Texas, when the district attorney threatened students of Praire View A&M, a historically black college, about illegal voting.

As the Brennan Center noted in a 2006 policy brief, the key issue is the equal protection clause, which "precludes states from subjecting students to more rigorous registration requirements than are generally applied to other citizens." Further:

A few courts have held that a state may make an additional inquiry in a good faith attempt to determine residency, so long as it does not require students to meet a different standard from any other person seeking to register to vote. However, if the inquiry is designed to elicit irrelevant information that is unnecessary to assess fairly whether the student considers the college community to be her primary residence (e.g., where the student's car is registered), it creates a per se rule against residence in the college community, which violates the equal protection clause.

Or as Sujatha Jahagirdar of the New Voters Project says in The Times:

There's no issue for snowbirds who live in Iowa but fly to Florida for the winter. One demographic group, like students, shouldn't have to overcome a special hurdle to vote. We impose all the responsibilities of citizenship on students, and we have to provide them with the privileges of citizenship, too.