Thursday, February 07, 2013

Students: Republicans Don't Want You To Vote

A new bill in Indiana proposes that students who pay out-of-state tuition would not be able to vote in the state.

It's unlikely to take effect even if it passes: "Conditioning voting rights on a 12-month residency is so clearly unconstitutional that it would be an utter waste of the legislature's time to consider such a bill."

That's not a hypothetical unconstitutional: this already got fought to the Supreme Court in 1972. In Dunn v Blumstein the Court that states cannot require residents to have lived in that state for more than a month before registering to vote.

But the legislation is of a piece with last year's local Farm Bureau platform resolution, which said that students should be required to vote by absentee ballot from their parent's address - a harder process which makes it less likely to actually happen. (There's still some smoldering hard feelings from the two 21 bar votes and from the passage of the 2008 conservation bond. Can you imagine how freaked out people would get if a student actually made it to the Iowa City council?)

As always thanks to the vigilant Ballot Access News for catching this one.

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