Republicans are trying to make it harder for college to students to vote

April 21, 2023 5:34 PM

Republican lawmakers are making it harder for students to cast ballots where they attend school, after the GOP suffered stinging recent electoral losses largely due to a historic surge in turnout from younger voters backing Democrats.

A presentation by Cleta Mitchell at a donor retreat urged tougher rules that could make it harder for college students to cast ballots.

Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged.

posted by shoesietart (22 comments total)

I’m shocked. SHOCKED!
Republicans, the party of truth, honor, family, and other groovy shit like that?

Honestly. Where are the weather underground when we need them.
Those damned hippies are unreliable.
posted by evilDoug at 6:21 PM on April 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

Standing athwart history yelling stop. Their voters will keep dying and new voters will keep coming.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:29 PM on April 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

Republicans do not believe in our system of government, they believe in the rule of the monied, as long as the monied throw some money their way, to garner their loyalty.

The monied are oil, and mineral extraction, rich monarchies. Drug manufacture and exportation rich, monarchies and fascist narco-states, oh yes and weapons manufacturers, not to forget chemical and pharma companies.

These entities thereby control the only factors which would control them at all, basically the laws enacted to protect the people who live anywhere.

Republicans, making it difficult for their critics to vote? That is just one of the many, oppressive things they do, including trying to make a slave society, which is more white in color, by blocking immigration to the US by browner skinned peoples, and banning abortion, for all but their mistresses and daughters, while both leching and publicly bible clutching. Then, manipulating the mood of their base so that random, but most often, people of color die, from the boil over. Republicans ptah!
posted by Oyéah at 6:35 PM on April 21, 2023 [27 favorites]

The wild part of this is that Republicans are perfectly willing to deny their own children the right to vote where they go to school. All those Campus Republican groups inviting toxic speakers to trigger free speech conflicts will also not get to vote. They'll happily throw lots of Republicans under the bus if it means the bus runs over proportionately more Democratic party voters.
posted by srboisvert at 7:08 PM on April 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

The wild part of this is that Republicans are perfectly willing to deny their own children the right to vote where they go to school.

If those kids are likely to vote Democrat, then that's a win-win. If they're likely to vote Republican, those families probably have enough resources to get their child home for voting day or to help them overcome all the barriers put in place so they can vote where they are attending school.
posted by hippybear at 7:11 PM on April 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Spain requires people to vote at their permanent address, which for many young people means traveling to where their parents live. It’s the same regressive impulse at work, and it depresses turnout for socialist other and leftist parties.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 7:49 PM on April 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

Is it a republic when you get to choose your public?
posted by grokus at 9:51 PM on April 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

The Tennessee expulsions reveal the core divide in US politics. Here’s why.

Because the US essentially shut off immigration between 1924 and 1965, nearly three-fourths of baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) are White, as are more than three-fourths of the remaining seniors from the older generations before them, according to Frey’s figures. By contrast, Frey has calculated, people of color comprise well over two-fifths of Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996), just under half of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) and slightly more than half the youngest generation born since 2012. That youngest generation (sometimes called Generation Alpha) will be the first in American history in which racial “minorities” constitute the majority.

The transition extends to other dimensions of personal identity. The Public Religion Research Institute has calculated that while just 17% of Americans aged 65 or older and 20% of those aged 50-64 do not identify with any organized religion, the share of those “seculars” rises to 32% among those aged 30-49 and 38% among adults 18-29. In turn, while White Christians constitute about half of all adults aged 50-64 and three-fifths of seniors, they comprise only about one-third of those aged 30-49 and only one-fourth of the youngest adults.

Gender identity and sexual orientation follow the same tracks. Gallup has found that while less than 3% of baby boomers and only 4% of Generation X (born 1965-1980) identify as LGBTQ, that figure jumps to nearly 11% among Millennials and fully 21% among Generation Z. In all these ways, says Deckman, who is writing a book on Gen Z, “you have a younger group of Americans who are more diverse, less religious, care passionately about the rights of marginalized groups, and are watching rights taken away that they thought would always be there.”
...
Kids of color already represent about half or more of the youth population in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina and Arizona and about two-fifths or more in several others, including Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. In many of those states the share of seniors who are White is at least 20 percentage points higher than the share of young people.

posted by kirkaracha at 10:30 PM on April 21, 2023 [39 favorites]

Make it difficult to vote, read a book, have an abortion...
posted by DJZouke at 4:57 AM on April 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

So changing your address to get in-state tuition is only done by liberal families? Spare me.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:02 AM on April 22, 2023

Making concealed-carry permits acceptable voter IDs and not doing the same for college IDs could've been a clue.
posted by box at 6:22 AM on April 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

If they're likely to vote Republican, those families probably have enough resources to get their child home for voting day or to help them overcome all the barriers put in place so they can vote where they are attending school.

For what it's worth, I think that's probably not true. I think it's just that Republicans have done the math and decided that it's worth it to disenfranchise a small number of Republican college students in order to disenfranchise a much larger number of Democratic college students.

Republicans have tried to pull this shit where I live, and for now the local university has managed to fend them off. The legislature created a voter ID requirement that wouldn't allow students to use their student IDs. The university is now issuing every student a document that complies with the voter ID regulations. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the legislature did something to outlaw that solution, but for now, students can still vote relatively easily.

Conventional wisdom among Democrats here is that students are not a terribly big factor in local or state electoral politics, because they mostly only vote in presidential years and often skip the down-ballot races. I think that's kind of bullshit, and also a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy, and my hunch is that the current generation is going to fuck with a lot of people's perceptions about young people's political behavior.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:24 AM on April 22, 2023 [14 favorites]

Conventional wisdom among Democrats here is that students are not a terribly big factor in local or state electoral politics, because they mostly only vote in presidential years and often skip the down-ballot races.

There are many obstacles to the youth vote, 18-24, because they move so often, and the ID thing is related because of eligibility. Same day voter registration seems to be the winner.
posted by Brian B. at 9:07 AM on April 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't think that any barriers to voting should be discounted... I haven't believed that my vote for president has mattered in the slightest for the 40 years I've been alive. Living in a solidly red state means my presidential vote is thrown in the trash carefully recorded as very important statistics that don't effect anything at all. The governor race is similar, when the last democrat left in 1995. I know voting is still important, that democrats are literally the only political side with any power that thinks I should be allowed to live, and local wins can have big impact. But being told my vote maaattteerrsss is so heavily asterisked to be technically, yes, but only if a whole bunch of other people vote with me to overcome the massive disparities made worse by weighting.


And I deeply appreciate the GOTV efforts and I'm not trying to be all doom and gloom, but I don't think the democrats have ever really done enough to sell themselves. I'm still going to vote, but the bad system means that it doesn't matter. I don't know how to get past that especially when one side is actively trying to make the situation worse constantly
posted by Jacen at 9:13 AM on April 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Speaking from Georgia, where no Democrat won a state race from 2002 until 2020, when we voted for Biden and sent two Democrats to the Senate, that shit can change. I promise. And an important part of that change has been college students standing in line for hours to vote (while the rich white folks in the suburbs can walk in and vote and be out in 15 minutes).
posted by hydropsyche at 9:32 AM on April 22, 2023 [14 favorites]

but the bad system means that it doesn't matter.

Voter suppression is both mental and physical. Even if they burn ballots, they matter, because they at least need to hide their crime. Extreme candidates emerge when only primaries count.
posted by Brian B. at 11:11 AM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

That youngest generation (sometimes called Generation Alpha) will be the first in American history in which racial “minorities” constitute the majority.

I have always hated this framing. It feels like all minorities are being "you peopled" into one big bucket. Minorities will never constitute a majority because they are not a single unitary thing. They are different groups of people sometimes with very little in common other than not being white. Some minority groups even come from countries/ethnic groups that are war with each other!

White people can cease to be a demographic majority without anyone else becoming a demographic majority and it is important to realize that White people will remain a relative majority or plurality for a very long time even once White people are no longer 50% of the population.

In a way this is the demographers version of White nationalist's replacement panic.
posted by srboisvert at 2:48 PM on April 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Electoral politics has never been my favorite past time. It can affect limited change leading to the fully functional democracy that this still young country could be. I do not disregard significant legislation of the past that has benefitted the common man. However, politicians create the illusion that they represent us and are working for our common good. We all know that the banks and mega-corporations control the metronome.
posted by DJZouke at 4:17 PM on April 22, 2023

The Idaho law banning the use of student IDs to vote happened after "the number of 18- and 19-year-olds registered to vote jumped 81% from 2018 to 2022, the largest percentage increase in any state." This heartening bit is from research done by the Tufts Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, founded in 2001 and linked in the Bloomberg article in the FPP's first line. CIRCLE research on young voters tracks their turnout, the issues they care about, and what helps or hinders their participation.

24 Ways to Grow Voters Before 2024 & Dispelling Myths about Youth Voting from Tufts CIRCLE.
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:48 PM on April 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well, to be fair, Idaho is also working hard to ban enough woke subjects like science and such that their upper education institutions are teetering on the edge of losing their accreditation. So they're playing the really big game when it comes to limiting college student voting.
posted by hippybear at 7:19 PM on April 22, 2023

I have long felt there needs to be parity between the Right to Vote and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. If you believe you don't need to register and show ID to own guns, then you shouldn't believe in registration and ID to vote.

Of course, rank hypocrisy never stopped a Republican.
posted by mikelieman at 5:19 AM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Vote suppression proves that Republican stances are unpopular with the majority, and the Republicans know it.
posted by Gelatin at 5:28 AM on April 24, 2023 [2 favorites]