“Fencing Out” Outsiders from Voting
Class 10: From College Campuses to Military Bases, A Constitutional No-No
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When Barack Obama needed to win Ohio late in the 2012 campaign, he knew exactly where to go. He dedicated precious days of the election’s final week working his way diagonally down Ohio’s Interstate 71, firing up young voters on college campus after college campus.
I was at his final stop, at the University of Cincinnati, the Sunday night before the election. It was electric. You sensed the history taking place:
Obama’s victory only two days later, repeating his formula from 2008, came in part from his success in inspiring those Ohio college voters to turn out in big numbers.
Smarting from those losses, Ohio Republicans grew fixated with the very campus voters Obama had inspired in that final week. And they especially groused about those students who hailed from other states. That number totals around 100,000.
But beyond complaining, Ohio Republicans actually acted on their frustration. Multiple times. With truly cynical measures.
First, the legislature proposed a law that, if Ohio universities and colleges furnished students the documentation allowing them to vote in Ohio (then, students could present a utility bill or other forms of ID), those schools would be required to charge lower in-state tuition to those students. This would have imposed a whopping financial penalty for any school that facilitated its students voting on campus in Ohio. (One estimate was that collectively, the schools would have lost close to $400 million.) A heck of a penalty simply for allowing democracy on their campuses.
When that proposal died (to their credit, universities and colleges fought back)…
…along came a second attempt. Before the 2016 election, the GOP legislature tucked into a transportation bill a provision that any student who registered to vote in Ohio had to, within 30 days, both get an Ohio driver’s license and register their car in Ohio, or they would be guilty of a misdemeanor. (Think about that—a poll tax and criminal sanction all at once, just for voting in Ohio!). The horrific bill passed both the House and Senate, but after a bipartisan firestorm of criticism from students across the state (yes, we at the party helped raise the alarm), Governor Kasich vetoed that bill. Good for him.
Now, we knew exactly why these legislators didn’t want these students voting in Ohio. For the same reason Obama did that campus tour in that final week. But of course Ohio’s GOP didn’t want to come out and admit that as their reason.
So what did they say to justify their cynical proposals? Here was the former Ohio House Speaker’s justification:
“[W]hen I first came here people who were coming in from New York or some other place could not vote in Ohio. Then there were federal court decisions and other peculiar things, so that was permitted. The real issue is, for local areas in particular, what happens after somebody from New York City registers to vote. How do they vote on the school levy, how do they vote on the sheriff’s race, and so forth? Obviously it would be possible for people to become knowledgeable in those areas, but there's to me a significant question, about what the particularly levies, what the result of having people who don't have to pay for them would do in terms of adopting those things.”
Recall that, in our last class, we explored how the authors of the 1901 Alabama Constitution doomed its felony disenfranchisement law because they expressed a blatantly unconstitutional intent.
Well, if you parse the paragraph above closely, you’ll see that Ohio’s former Speaker did the exact same thing there. And ironically, the “federal court decisions and other peculiar things” he refers to actually make it crystal clear that in acting upon the motivation he expressed above, he was violating the Constitution.
Class 10 of the Voting Rights Academy will be about those important “federal court decisions and other peculiar things,” which established that it is illegal to “fence off” blocs of voters because you believe they are less connected to the community, and may vote differently, than other voters.
While decades old, these cases could not be more relevant today, because as the Ohio college example shows, politicians still can’t resist attempting to accomplish exactly what is now forbidden….
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