New Hampshire Democrats will Protect Their Corporatist Allies in the University system. - Granite Grok

New Hampshire Democrats will Protect Their Corporatist Allies in the University system.

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Can we call it UNH’s $14K/year poll tax?

HB1255, up for a vote today in the New Hampshire House, will probably fail.  HB1255 would make students whose name appear on the voter checklist eligible for in-state tuition rates at schools in the university system of New Hampshire.  It will fail because Democrats control that body and require the inequality that HB1255 would correct, remain in place.  What is this inequality?  It is the demand by Democrats that out of state students be allowed to vote as if they live in NH, while still requiring them to pay out of state tuition.

The Union Leader, Clarifies it for us.

Democrats insist, as Rep. Anne Grassie, D-Rochester, did, that “there is no correlation” between voting and in-state tuition. Then how does she explain that the University of New Hampshire considers voting registration to be an indication of residency for determining a student’s tuition rate?

University System of New Hampshire trustees set the requirements for instate and out-of-state tuition.

The first is that a student must be domiciled in New Hampshire for at least 12 months to qualify for in-state tuition. Ten other factors are “relevant” to determining domicile. They include automobile registration, residence as listed on tax returns, and “voting residence.”

As university policy already declares that voting residence is an indication of one’s domicile for tuition purposes, it is pretty hard to argue that the two have “no correlation.”

We’ve been making this case for years, as have other sensible minds.  If you let them vote here, then you must let them pay in-state tuition.  But that would cost the UNH system, burdened as it is with white-tower liberals, $14,000 per student, per year.  If you have ever seen or heard stories about the successive busloads of university students the Democrats ferry to and from the polls from each of the state’s campuses, you understand the universities dilemma.

The UL editorial continues.

New Hampshire Democrats are clearly saying that they want out-of-state students to vote in New Hampshire and pay out-of- state tuition. The only beneficiary of this policy is the New Hampshire Democratic Party, which receives the votes of both the out-of- state students and the faculty whose salaries (and donations to the Democratic Party) are financed by the higher out-of-state tuition rates. The out-of-state students lose. Those at UNH pay an additional $14,000 a year in tuition.

How compassionate. We wonder if those students will ever realize that they are being used.

If the requirements for voting in the state were even remotely similar to the university system’s rules of residency for in-state tuition, there would be no out-of state college students voting in the Granite State.  In fact, vote fraud would not be a problem at all.

But New Hampshire Democrats need those ballot boxes stuffed, and UNH wants that money.  So You should expect New Hampshire Democrats to kill HB 1255 to protect their confiscatory, corporatist allies in the Univeristy system.

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