Newly Minted New Hampshire State Senator Victoria Sullivan has a bill before the Senate that would prohibit student ID as proof of residency for voting purposes. SB223 had its first hearing yesterday morning, and it did not lack for naysayers, especially since the bill had a hook.
This bill provides for in-state tuition at any institution in the university system of New Hampshire or the community college system for any person who is registered to vote in this state. The bill also removes college or university identification cards from valid photo identification for obtaining a ballot.
The last time the legislature proposed mandatory in-state tuition for out-of-state students who were allowed to vote, the state university system lost its hive mind. And why wouldn’t it? Any student who failed to meet the university system guidelines for residency – far stricter than for registering to vote – would get a massive discount on the cost of their education. In-state students pay about $15K a year, while out-of-state students pay over $35K.
Register to vote and save 20K a year on tuition.
The University System of New Hampshire warned that if most out-of-state students register to vote to get in-state tuition under the bill, “revenue would decrease to unsustainable levels.”
“I do take strong exception to allowing the law and proof of registration to vote tied to in-state tuition,” said Catherine Provencher, chancellor of the University System of New Hampshire.
“If they’re encouraging their students to vote in-state, then they should also give them in-state tuition, because they’re acknowledging them as residents,” Sullivan said.
This is a drum we’ve been beating for nearly twenty years, and I confess to a bit of embarrassment that I didn’t know the hearing was yesterday. I’ve written so extensively on the topic that I’d have emailed all the State Senators some testimony (my other work prevents me from traveling to Concord to do this in person).
The crux of the argument is one with which readers will be familiar. New Hampshire’s current standard for out-of-state college students gives them more voting rights than Granite Stater’s. A student from any other state can vote in the local, county, state, and federal election from the address on their college application. That’s the mailing address where the tuition bill goes. It is where the IRS taxes them if they work. It is also on their state-issued ID or driver’s license. As interpreted, they can also vote in my local, state, and federal elections.
They can vote in mine, but I can’t vote in theirs, and the State cannot constitutionally give them more rights than me. And yet, for years, it has done precisely that, and the university system has encouraged this injustice alongside the New Hampshire Democrat Party and the Democrat National Committee. There is no shortage of evidence. Student voting rights are often a pillar of many Democrat campaigns, and many Granite Stater are tired of this inequity.
Students in New Hampshire should vote in their parents’ state via an absentee ballot because that is their home, Sullivan argued, not where their dormitory is. And those who want to claim New Hampshire as their home should demonstrate that desire by getting a driver’s license or state ID card, she said.
“My son lives in Manchester with our family,” Sullivan said. “He attends school in Boston. He stays on campus throughout the year, with the exceptions of Christmas and spring break. He comes home for summer. He voted in New Hampshire by an absentee ballot in the last election. It took less time to vote absentee than it would have taken him to stand in line to vote on Election Day.”
This imbalance has skewed the results of the election at every level, denying New Hampshire’s true citizens their right to representation and everything that follows from it. All in the shadow of Democrat efforts to legalize universal absentee voting and vote by mail. Proof that it is not a hardship to expect a student from Indiana to vote absentee in their home state than to steal a vote from mine.
I have no sense of the temperature in the Senate for moving this bill forward. I do know that if it were to become law in any form that prevented non-resident students from voting, there would be lawsuits, and previous forays into the judicial realm have not gone well for clean elections. Judges can’t seem to find a path to the inequality they are advocating when they let non-residents have more rights than people who live here, and if we don’t all have them, they can’t be called a right.
We’ll keep doing our part when we can, but you need to send the message to your legislators. Out of State students are not entitled to more voting rights than Granite Staters
