Students registering in college towns told no longer dependents, could lose scholarships, insurance

NYT: Voter Registration by Students Raises Cloud of Consequences
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: September 7, 2008

The widespread practice of students’ registering to vote at their college address has set off a fracas in Virginia, a battleground state in the presidential election.

Late last month, as a voter-registration drive by supporters of Senator Barack Obama was signing up thousands of students at Virginia Tech, the local registrar of elections issued two releases incorrectly suggesting a range of dire possibilities for students who registered to vote at their college. The releases warned that such students could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns, a statement the Internal Revenue Service says is incorrect, and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents’ car and health insurance.

After some inquiries from students and parents, and more pointed questions from civil rights lawyers, the state board of elections said Friday that it was “modifying and clarifying” the state guidelines on which the county registrar had based his releases.

Student-registration controversies have been a recurring problem since 1971, when the 26st Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 from 21, and despite a 1979 ruling by the United States Supreme Court that students have the right to register at their college address. Virginia is not the only state with murky guidelines. South Carolina’s voter-registration site, for example, says students who want to register to vote at their college address must demonstrate “a present intention to remain in the community.”...

Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director of the Student Public Interest Research Group’s New Voters Project....said Virginia’s warnings were profoundly misleading. “We have been registering young voters for 25 years,” she said. “We registered 500,000 young voters in 2004, the majority on college campuses, and we’ve never heard of a single one who lost health insurance, scholarship or tax status because of where they registered to vote.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/education/08students.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

Out daughter did this because I was afraid they would try something like this.

We have a Dem governor in a battlground state. It's time to start using our strengths.

I wish they would consider her a full time resident, we'd get in state tuition!

On a happier note, the Obama people are all over this in Blacksburg (where VA Tech is located) and are working hard to counteract this mis-information campaign.

Yes, they were told they could no longer be dependents, etc., but the essence of the article is that they were told lies by the state of Virginia and now civil rights groups have pressured the state into reneging some of those statements and "looking into" the overall state laws that violate federal law on this issue.

posted the info you cite is included. I did want to make a larger point in the subject line, however -- a point which I think is implicit in the article -- that this is something that in all likelihood is happening in other states besides Virginia, and needs attention.

In my family, we had a student who voted four years at a college in a small town in battleground Ohio -- and she got the sense, from remarks made at the polling place, that her vote, and that of other students, might somehow not have been counted. Her college precinct was also the site of nationally-reported voter suppression on Election Night '04.

But I had forgotten it until you just said it again, so thanks for the reminder. And I hear ya about post titles--I have a hard time keeping mine brief as well. :hi:

next to a much more conservative town. The town had voting machines galore, while Kenyon had two, one of which broke down early on. There were Dem lawyers there, who called the Secy of State -- who was, of course, Ohio Bush Chairman Ken Blackwell! Classes were suspended, so students could stand in line. They were determined to vote. Pizza, etc., even toilet paper for bathroom breaks, were brought to those in line. The kids let the older professors, and faculty widows to the front of the line. Tears come to my eyes just remembering it. They voted until 4 a.m., long after Bush's "victory" had been declared.

On edit: Meanwhile, in Columbus, I understand minority neighborhoods had similar problems, but those voters had jobs to go to, etc., and couldn't wait all day. As we all know, that day in Ohio represented a landmark case of Dem voter suppression.

Whether one can vote in a state is determined by that state's election laws.

Whether one can be claimed as a dependent on federal taxes is determined by the federal tax code.

These two things have nothing to do with each other.

E. Randall Wertz, VREO General Registrar of Elections
Montgomery County Government Center
755 Roanoke St., Suite 1F

Christiansburg VA, 24073-3175

Phone: (540) 382-5741
Fax: (540) 381-6811
govote121@montgomerycountyva.gov

Hours: Mon.-Fri. 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.



http://www.montva.com/departments/vote/


Let's flood this b@satrd with calls and email until he rues the day he was born.

This aggression will not stand, man.

is a real headache for the county elections office in a number of ways.

The campus is broke up into a couple of different precincts, with thousands of registered voters from current and past voter registration drives. But, turnout is bizarrely low. Five percent or lower at times. It is a problem with the books, cause by law they can't "purge" voters for years. It also is a problem relative to having the proper number of voting machines - state law requires a ratio per registered voter. SO, if the ratio is one machine for every 500 voters, and there are 500 registered voters, they HAVE to have 10 machines and the proper number of voluteers for what might be a turnout of less than 100 voters.

Just saying MAYBE this is just an uptight county office that doesn't want to deal with dead registrations.