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In reply to the discussion: Liberty's choice of Romney leads to angry student response [View all]Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)You seem less than enthralled with the total package...
But here's the deal, you don't get to decide where their residence is. That is up to each student and if they decide it is where they spend the vast majority of the year, that is where they get to vote. If a college has dorms, where the students live, it's called a residential college. Residential, as in residence, as in the students live there. If you want, complain that they don't change their driver's license, their car's registration (if they are from out of state and have a car).
The concept that their vote affects you on a nation level... Seriously? Where are you going to deport them for voting purposes that does NOT affect you on a national level? At a state level, one college worth of out of state students isn't going to swing an entire state. Locally, as you pointed out yourself, you don't live there.
Requiring someone to get an absentee ballot is no less a hindrance than requiring a photo ID to be able to vote. It's a form of disenfranchisement, pure and simple. If college students were required to obtain an absentee ballot, fill it out and mail it back, many of them will just not bother. Bad enough that most college towns place the polling place as far from campus as possible.
It's unfortunate that you have to interact with conservative students day to day where you work, but from a voting perspective, you don't really have a leg to stand on. Personally, I'm having to keep an open mind to specifically defend a conservate's right to vote where they live, but my goal is to quash the notion that college students don't have a right to vote where they live. Mainly because there are more liberal college students than there are conservative students and throwing up roadblocks in their path to voting is not a good thing.