Rogue North Carolina Targets Student Voting

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/rogue-north-carolina-targets-student-voting




Just days after North Carolina’s Republican Gov. Pat McCrory signed a GOP-authored “ hit list” bill rolling back a generation of inclusive voting reforms, election officials in two college towns have begun targeting student voters.

The county election board near Appalachian State University will close an early voting site and Election Day precinct on that campus. And the board near Elizabeth City State University barred a student from running for city council, saying the senior’s on-campus address did not make him a legal resident and thus eligible to run for office.

Barriers to student voting are nothing new, but these North Carolina attacks are signs of what the GOP wants to do nationally, especially in states where it is the political majority. Its strategy is to complicate voting by slices of society presumed to lean Democratic, whether non-whites, the poor or students. What’s not as widely known is that a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision (not the one that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act) is encouraging the Republicans to target these voting blocks.

Progressives know the Republican Party’s white and wealthier base is shrinking as America’s demographics shift and people of color inch toward outnumbering whites. But what progressives may not know is how extensively the Court’s majority, all appointed by Republican presidents, is helping the GOP to make voting less free and less fair.