A story from CNN caught my eye yesterday:
Mississippi Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith appeared to say laws that make it “just a little more difficult” for attendees of some of the state’s universities to vote are a “great idea” in a video posted Thursday. “And then they remind me that there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea,” Hyde-Smith says in the video.
Seems to be that this is more than a trend than in Rexburg. When I went and voted on the 6th at my precinct I was greeted by the sign (above) on the table where volunteers were sitting and where new voters were to register (we have same day registration in Idaho with photo ID and proof of 30 day residency — and yes, that includes students). I shared it on twitter and Idaho ACLU suggested that I call and report it and they’d look into it. As a result, they sent a letter to the Secretary of State and issued a press release, all of which can be found here. The Idaho statesman also had a good review of how things went down.
For the most part I support students voting by absentee (I’ve said this in other places before), but they also have a legal right to change their residency if they meet requirements and vote. Especially since about half the student body is married and many of them and their spouses work full-time in the community. Regardless all of the students need to know the real consequences, which at the very least means that for everyone registering to vote in Idaho, they now need to file taxes in Idaho and if they own a car, pay registration fees here. Rexburg has a history and reputation of discouraging students to vote — the most common refrain I’ve heard is that they’ve been told that there’s a good chance students could lose their scholarships and financial aid (I mean, really??) if they change their permanent residencies to Madison County. I think both the university and local communities hold a special responsibility of helping to educate these students on how and when to vote. Some might call it . . . a civic duty.
Wheat & Tares 
Maybe they are worried because college students tend to be more liberal than the typical member and republicans have become known for voter suppression.
I suppose some of the students come from places like California, so might be more progressive.
Very sad that illegal voter discouragement seems the order of the day in the US. Democracy?
I don’t see anything illegal or shady in posting reminders that you don’t get to vote in any place you happen to be. Voting is a serious obligation and people should take care in what and who they are voting for.
I don’t like it when the Democrat Party busses people all over the place on election day.
Mark:
1. You get to vote in the precinct you are registered.
2. If you meet the legal requirements to register at your university address, you can register and vote, and the government should not be telling you not to register or not to vote.
3. Voting is a serious obligation, and therefore, students should be encouraged, not discouraged to vote.
4. What does “taking care who you vote for” have to do with whether students register at their school or home address?
5. There is no such thing as a “Democrat Party.”
6. The Republican Party, the Democratic Party, or anybody else is to be lauded for providing transportation to the polls. If voting is such a serious obligation, then why do you want to interfere with providing the means for people to vote.
Yeah guys, I think you’re right BYU-I is *packed* with liberals.
jpv, the sign rather explicitly says “if you’re not one of us, go vote somewhere else, don’t vote here.” The sign disproportionately targets students who are from outside the region. Arguably, students from out of state are more likely to lean liberal than the general population of the area. But that doesn’t even matter. Students who legally qualify and choose to register in Rexburg have every right to do so. The only effect of the sign would be to turn people away who have already legally registered.
“34-405. Gain or loss of residence by reason of absence from state. For the purpose of voting, no person shall be deemed to have gained or lost a residence by reason of his absence while employed in the service of this state or the United States, while a student of any institution of learning, while kept at any state institution at public expense, nor absent from the state with the intent to have this state remain his residence. If a person is absent from this state but intends to maintain his residence for voting purposes here, he shall not register to vote in any other state during his absence.”
If this is the statue referenced in the sign, then nothing in it is applicable to the assertions in the sign. 34-405 says that Idaho residents who attend school outside Idaho do not lose their right to vote in Idaho elections if they intend to remain an Idaho resident while attending school. Students from Idaho are allowed to change their voting residency to another location if they choose. And the statute certainly does not say anything at all that would prohibit a BYU-I student from transferring residency to Rexburg for voting purposes if the student chooses to do so.
“34-402. Qualifications of electors. Every male or female citizen of the United States, eighteen (18) years old, who has resided in this state and in the county for thirty (30) days where he or she offers to vote prior to the day of election, if registered within the time period provided by law, is a qualified elector.”
Thirty days after you have resided in Rexburg, you are entitled to register and vote there if you so choose.
Disclaimer: IANAL
Discouraging Rexburg students from voting is not only intended to suppress liberal voters. It also reduces representation for students’ interests in local and state government. Voter suppression is an old and effective strategy in town-gown conflicts.
When I first moved here to Georgia, one of my “diverse” coworkers was laughing the day after the election about how he managed to vote for Bill Clinton 4 times. He had lived in different apartments and knew several people and had a common name. He justified his actions with the excuse that lots of his friends did the same thing and many people are lazy and don’t bother to vote. He was just voting for them.
In the most recent election we had an extreme right wing nut job running against an extreme left wing nut job for governor. The way the election rules are constructed, if one candidate does not get more than 50%, then only the top 2 candidates go at it again in a run-off election. This generally has very low turn-out and favors the candidate with more money and more loyal and reliable supporters. It is designed to prevent people like Ross Perot (1992 and 1996) from stealing a disproportionate number of votes from a slightly more popular candidate (Bush and Dole) and allowing a less popular candidate (Clinton ) to win a close election. Or so they claim.
So nut job A got 50.04% and nut job B demanded recounts which slightly favored A. Then B wanted to count votes cast improperly, or sent in late and people start voting after the election and sending in ballots and this lets all kinds of people vote after the election. It turns into a contest of who can cheat the most. A started out ahead and has the advantage. Both sides have a history of tampering with elections in various ways. B sues A and refuses to concede and 2 weeks later admits that legally A is ahead but cheated and vows to fight it. Even if B can get the votes of A down to only 49.99%, B is unlikely to win a run-off since A has far more money and and more reliable support. B acts like such an irrational brat it seems doubtful B could win half as many votes the first time around.
People, pull your heads out on both sides. Stop being sore losers and stop cheating. Both sides! We are so close to the end of the American democracy it isn’t funny. And if either side thinks their party will be the more benevolent overlords in some kind of dictatorship, think again. We will all loose almost everything.
“We need and want…” Huh? This was actually put out by a public official? One more reason Rexburg is so damn weird and bad at making and enforcing rules.
This reminds that back when I was a student in London at Imperial College, the college were very fed up of obstructions in local politics, so I think in my second year all students living in halls and living otherwise nearby were encouraged to register to vote at their university addresses, in order to be able to vote in the local government elections, and the college put up their own candidates for election. The college and halls at the time straddled two London boroughs Kensington & Chelsea on one side, and Knightsbridge on the other. And college candidates stood in both boroughs. As I recall, the college candidates didn’t quite get enough votes to win, but they certainly made the conservatives sweat during the counts. After that experience the local councils realised they couldn’t ignore the college in the way they had up to that point.
Blah blah ‘voter suppression” blah blah. The fact is that Idaho like most states has residency requirements for voting. And moving to Rexburg to attend school is not sufficient to establish residency under Idaho law. The statute that Left Field kindly quoted says as much.
It’s not likely that a bunch of 18-year-olds gave much thought to voting before heading off to Rexburg, and it’s even less likely that they have thought as much about what “residency” means under the Idaho statutes as Left Field has. And if they did, they probably got it wrong, just as he did.
Since Idaho permits same-day registration and voting, there’s a good chance that a lot of BYU-I students could walk down to a polling place and sign a registration form that contains false statements as to their residence. And that’s what the warning sign seems to be aimed at preventing.
There are two possible solutions, one easy and the other not so simple. First, the college (is there not a Political Science Department?) should provide information for interested students well before election day, so they can register in the place where they maintain their residence and obtain an absentee ballot if they cannot return there on election day. Second (the more difficult solution) is to support an amendment of the law to permit students to establish residency simply by living in Rexburg while enrolled in school. Students surely have interests in local governance, and it would be well if they got involved in issues that directly affect their lives while in that place.
I heartily agree with Mark B. that it is good for students’ voices to be heard in local government.
I think that Mark B. is mistaken in his reading of Idaho voter requirements. As I read the statutes, people who have lived in Idaho for at least 30 days are eligible to vote, and there is no exception for students. The statute that Left Field quoted, 34-405, says that certain people, including students, who live temporarily outside of Idaho do not lose their residency for the purpose of voting in Idaho. It says nothing about people who come to Idaho as students. The language of this statute is not perfectly clear, but I think that’s what it means.
I also note that under Idaho Code 34-408A, people registering on election day may prove their residence using, among other things, “a current valid student photo identification card from a postsecondary education institution in Idaho accompanied with a current student fee statement that contains the student’s valid address in the precinct.”
Happily, it appears that there is no need to amend Idaho law to allow students to establish Idaho residency.
(I have not done a thorough search of the Idaho Code, and I have not researched case law on this question. If I have missed something that should change my observations here, I would be grateful to be corrected. )
Loursat,
The relevant statute is I. C. 34-107: “”Residence,” for voting purposes, shall be the principal or primary home or place of abode of a person. Principal or primary home or place of abode is that home or place in which his habitation is fixed and to which a person, whenever he is absent, has the present intention of returning after a departure or absence therefrom, regardless of the duration of absence.”
The sign is correct both as a statement of law and of the philosophical principle that underpins the law. You don’t choose your residence for the purpose of voting; you vote where you are a resident. Students who intend to return to their home state after school do not meet the definition of resident in Idaho state law. To register as an Idaho voter simply because you want to vote in federal elections simply and you forgot to go through the absentee process is voter fraud.
Residency requirements are perfectly reasonable. I think those who view attempts to exclude students with no intent to remain in the college town/state as partisan voter suppression have a juvenile view of elections and democracy. Locals don’t want students to vote because students don’t have a long term interest in the policies of the locality, not because they might have some particular partisan bent. Temporary residents don’t have a stake in school board representatives, bonds, long term infrastructure projects, or most of the other issues that end up on local ballots.
The language on this sign is a bit problematic, and if one of my local government clients presented something like this, I would have advised a number of changes to make it clear that it is a statement of the law, not a statement of policy preference. It is important to note that this language came from a state official (the Secretary of State, I believe) 12 or so years ago and that there is another page that states the relevant law.
I also want to note that Kristine pulled this article after having made numerous ignorant misstatements of the law (which I pointed out), but claimed that her reason for pulling it was a desire to more actively participate in the comments. Her absence from the comments section on the second fo around is noteworthy.
Obviously the laws vary from state to state, but I believe that in general, the requirements for “residency” can be different for different purposes. When I moved to Texas for graduate school, I rented an apartment and paid utilities in Texas. I obtained a Texas driver’s license, I registered my car in Texas, I became employed in Texas, and I registered to vote in Texas. If Texas had a state income tax, I would have paid Texas income tax. I claimed no residency in my previous state, and I had no intention of returning. But for purposes of tuition at a state university, I was considered a non-resident because I had come to Texas for the purpose of school, and had not met any criteria to establish residency for tuition purposes (stuff like one year without being enrolled in school). For all purposes except tuition, I was a Texas resident. (And I don’t think my previous state would have allowed me to claim resident tuition either, after having moved away.)
I’m quite sure that I voted in the first election after I arrived. There was not some onerous waiting period. It seems the same in Idaho. You live there 30 days and you can register to vote. The yellow sign is a bunch of made-up nonsense. There’s so much wrong with the yellow sign, it’s hard even to know where to begin.
So moving to Rexburg to attend school might not be sufficient for you to pay resident tuition (not that that’s a thing at BYU-I), but it certainly IS sufficient to establish residency for purposes of voting. And even if it is true that registering to vote might have some effect on your scholarship, it’s not the job of the state to stop you from doing that. If you meet the legal requirements, they have to let you vote and not hassle you about it.
Dsc, I daresay most college students don’t intend to return and live with their parents after they graduate. But they should be perfectly competent to state what their intention is. If I live in Rexburg during my freshman year, and leave for the summer, I have the intention of returning for my sophomore year. If I state that as my “present intention,” then I meet the 34-107 requirement for residency for the purpose of voting.
I don’t know about normal public schools, but from my experience at BYU and from my interactions with BYU-I students, most students don’t plan on returning to their parents’ state after graduation. Very few of my college friends who came from out of state to attend BYU ended up returning to their home state. They instead end up wherever work or grad school is., or they follow their spouse to work or grad school.
Seems to me that people who are attending school, leasing property, and often working in Rexburg, especially when they have no plans to move “back” to wherever their parents live, are residents of Rexburg.
Left Field,
Certainly there are students who could be domiciled in Idaho. They could have the intent of continuing to live in Idaho, or they could be uncertain about their post-graduation plans, and Idaho could be just as likely as anywhere else. And these students probably ought to become Idaho residents and vote in Idaho elections. But there are also many students (particularly in Rexburg) who have absolutely no intent to stay in Idaho. The fact that they will return to school every year for four years doesn’t make them residents, as their ultimate intent is to return home or go somewhere other than Idaho. Many of those students choose to vote in Idaho only because they have missed the deadline for an absentee ballot. That is both wrong and illegal. It’s also probably unwise, as it may complicate establishing residency in their home state and may complicate taxes, vehicle registration, and other legal issues.
If a student has a “present intention of returning” to the address they came from, then they can continue to claim residency in their home state, and they can’t register in Idaho. But the law doesn’t require any of us to promise not to move out of state at some point in the future. Lots of people intend to get the heck out of wherever they are, but until they actually move and acquire a new address, then they vote where they are. Probably none of us knows where we will end up whenever we move from our current location. But a vague plan of “I hope to get a job in my home state of Nebraska” or “I want to retire to the south of France” or “Anywhere but Idaho!” doesn’t qualify as a “present intention of returning” somewhere. If you don’t have an actual address in Nebraska or the south of France that you intend to “return” to, then you can’t claim Nebraska or the south of France as your residence, and like it or not, you live in Rexburg, and you’d better vote in Rexburg.
Left Field,
That’s not how not how domicile works (which is the concept Idaho’s residency requirement is based on). Your domicile continues until you establish domicile somewhere else. So if you are from California and go to school in Idaho, and your intent is to go anywhere but Idaho after school, it doesn’t matter that you don’t intend to return to California. What matters is that you don’t intend to return to Idaho when you’re done with school. So if you wander with no intent to stay where you are, you continue to be domiciled in California until you land somewhere that you intend to stay and establish domicile.
The trick here is that there is no set time period, and so the question of domicile is very fact-specific. My point is that if you explicitly do not intend to stay put, you lack the requisite intent to establish residency under Idaho law, and if you just want to vote in Idaho because you forgot to get a California absentee ballot, you are violating Idaho law. Proving that is next to impossible, but it is nevertheless a violation of the law.
According to 34-402, you can establish domicile in Idaho for purposes of voting after 30 days, and if you do so, you would then no longer have domicile in California. There is nothing in the statute that requires you to commit to an ongoing residency in Idaho. What counts is your “present intention.” There is nothing that says that a four-year stay isn’t enough to establish residency. If you consider yourself to be living in Rexburg and not California, then Rexburg is the place you presently intend to return if you go somewhere else.
There’s nothing in the law about an intent to “stay put.” What does that even mean? How long do you have to stay to count as staying put? All any of us can say is what is required by Idaho–I have a “present intention” to live here. My future intentions may be unknown even to me, but I can never guarantee that I won’t move away at a moment’s notice. It’s not uncommon for a person to accept a one-year job, knowing that they will need to move somewhere else (known or unknown) after a year. But they are a resident and can register to vote as long as they live there. You seem to be saying that BYUI students can’t be Rexburg residents unless they make some unbreakable promise to stay in Idaho for–ever? for X years? I can’t find anything like that in any of the statutes that have been cited, and it just doesn’t seem to make sense. People live where they live until they move somewhere else, and as long as you live there, you’re a resident
Perhaps some of this is just a question of perspective. You might say that you live in Albuquerque with your parents, but for a few years, you’r going to be spending several months per year taking classes in Rexburg, and return “home” for holidays and in the summer. Or you might do exactly the same thing, but say that you’ve moved out of your parent’s home in Albuquerque, and are living in Rexburg, while perhaps visiting your parents for a holiday or an extended visit in the summer, after which you return “home” to Rexburg. Either way, what you regard as “home” is the place you intend to return after time away. And where you actually stay and when you stay there could be exactly the same in either case. I think it’s up to the student to state his/her own intention. I’m not seeing anything that says that a legal adult is required to claim his/her parent’s address as a legal residence. Anybody else who lives in the same place for four years gets to be a resident, even if they expect to change residence in the future.
Dsc, thank you for that reference to the Idaho statute. The exchange between Left Field and Dsc is interesting, and thank you both for that.
Left Field,
You’re right that the question turns on intent. My point is that if your intent is to high tail it out of Rexburg the moment you get your degree, then you haven’t established domicile under common law principles of domicile, which is what the Idaho residency requirement is based on. Generally, your domicile doesn’t change until you establish that intent, even if you don’t intend to return to your current domicile. That may be true of some students, but inot for others. If a student is voting locally solely because he or she didn’t get an absentee ballot from their true domicile, then I think it’s pretty clear that they haven’t established residency in Idaho, even if they have been there for 30 days.
Like Loursat, I’ve enjoyed the discussion between left field and Dsc. I’ll not add my analysis of the law itself, but I think it’s worth mentioning that the law is not determined solely by the text on paper but also by and precedent of how courts have interpreted the law in the past.
A quick Google search shows at least one case in a different state where the supreme Court ruled the state treat students like everyone else without additional scrutiny to determine future intent.
https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/27/supreme-court-case-opposes-greenville-college-voter-registration-policy/91182084/
I’m trying to keep an open mind here, but from what I’ve seen so far students in Idaho should be able to register to vote after thirty days in the state, and questionnaires or interviews to prevent that are unconstitutional unless they apply to everyone else as well.
If I were to accept employment at BYU-I knowing that in four years, I intend to retire and move to Florida, would I be allowed to vote in Rexburg during those four years? If so, how is my intent to high tail it out of Rexburg the minute I’m eligible to retire any different from a student’s intent to high tail it the minute she graduates?
I dated a girl that was born and raised in Provo. She hated the BYU students voting because they’d vote for things like tax increases on the residents, knowing that they’d be moving away in a few years and not having to deal with the repercussions of their vote.
You start to understand why the framers felt that only Land Owners should vote since they were the more stable population and would have to deal with the long term effects of their vote.