Voter Suppression on College Campuses

Written by: Cliff Cleland on Sep 18, 2008 2:54 PM EDT

Beware college students, someone may be trying to suppress your right to vote. Last month, supporters of `Barack Obama were registering thousands of students at Virginia Tech. University.  The Montgomery County registrar of elections then issued two news releases incorrectly suggesting that students who registered to vote at their college might lose their right to be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns or could lose scholarships or lose car and health insurance. All lies.

   According to an article titled “Warning  For College Student Voters,” published in Insider Higher Ed’s Web site on September 3, 2008, there is an “exemption in the U.S. tax code allowing dependents to live away from home while attending school.”  The article also states that in “calls to 10 top health insurance companies, none indicated that registering to vote at a college address would be grounds for dismissing students from coverage.

Furthermore, in 1979 the  Supreme Court ruled that students have the right to register to vote at their college addresses.

    If you receive a similar threat or notice at your college, challenge it. If denied your rights, you could contact the local ACLU who filed a federal lawsuit against William and Mary in 2004 on behalf of two students denied the right to register locally. The school caved in and the case was dropped.

       In 2004, college students, like this year, were registering heavily for the Democratic candidate. Just before the 2004 election the Ohio Sec of State rejected thousands of applications for voter registration mailed in by college students who had downloaded them from the internet. He used an arcane provision to rule that they weren’t submitted on heavy enough paper. Bush won a close victory in Ohio. If we go back to the 2000 election in Florida we find that in the run-up to the election, a Texas firm with close connections to Karl Rove was hired by the Florida Sec of State to purge the voter rolls of voters who were felons. It seems that about 50,000 African- Americans who were not felons but whose names were the same or close to someone who had been a felon were purged from the voting rolls which they discovered on election day when they were denied their right to vote. African Americans were voting heavily against George Bush in 2000. Bush won Florida by less than 500 votes. Karl Rove was an adviser to both of those Sec’s of State. There is a lot of evidence that Karl  Rove, chief Republican campaign strategist and dirty tricks guru was heavily involved in those acts of voter suppression on a grand scale and this one in Virginia looks suspiciously like his work.

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