Letting transient voters have a say in matters with long-term consequences is an injustice. The Democratic Party wouldn’t let 500 republicans in to vote at their annual convention and then just live with the results. No organization would. They could replace officers, alter the charter or bylaws, and, in the case of a contested matter within the caucus, tilt the scales in whatever direction pleased them.
Letting college students paying out-of-state tuition vote in our elections is wrong, and we’ve enumerated scores of reasons in hundreds of entries across two decades. The problem has gotten only slightly better, in part because our courts are part of the deep state cabal. Injustice is inevitable. The major law firms are all connected to each other and just about every scandal across decades. But their lawyers end up being our judges, so you might see how that works against everyone else’s favor.
As for voting, a college student in Maine wrote a rather long-winded appeal to her fellow out-of-state students, and the Portland Press Herald actually published it.
With Maine politics’ newfound national importance, progressive out-of-state college students like me will likely feel compelled to vote in Maine.
We shouldn’t.
Doing so will interfere with more important down-ballot issues determined in the local elections of towns students only see as a pit stop and prevent the people of those towns from making their own laws and electing their own representatives.
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While it’s hard to set a standard for what exactly makes someone a member of a community, knowing that I will move away from Waterville as soon as I graduate, and therefore won’t benefit or suffer from the long-term implications of what I vote for, puts me pretty far below that bar. And if I vote in Waterville, I’m diluting the vote of someone else who will live with the consequences of those decisions.
She makes, more or less, every case we ever have.
Voting in state and local elections has short- and long-term consequences that are as simple as money taken from taxpayers’ pockets. In New Hampshire, those votes affect budgets paid for with property taxes. They don’t own property. They are likely living on campus (with few and rare exceptions), and any taxes they pay are the ones we have to take advantage of tourists, which is what they are.
If and when they settle down, get an NH driver’s license, and declare New Hampshire as their only residence for all purposes, then, and only then, should they be considered inhabitants for any purpose but for voting in particular.
Here’s Cloe again, with another argument. One I don’t think I’ve actually considered.
College students should not consider themselves above the constraints of districts designed to ensure everyone has a voice in their own respective elections. It is unfair that only those who can afford to pay for an elite, private, out-of-state education should get to pick and choose where they vote in order to tip the scales toward their interests or toward what they perceive as the greater good.
And it goes without saying that no student, no matter where they are on the planet, is being denied their right to vote with access to absentee/vote by mail in the district where their tuition bill goes, from where they file their taxes, that being the address on their state ID/driver’s license. The place where they’d get picked for jury duty.
It should not be a partisan issue, and yet it is because a majority of college students vote Democrat, and we know this is true. If they were all republicans, Democrats would have prohibited out-of-state student voting years ago.
