New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting - Part I (the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and its immediate aftermath)

Let me start this piece off with a very basic question:

If you live somewhere for four years, should you be able to vote and have a say in the affairs of the state and local government?

Most people would say yes. If you live in a community, if you study there, work there, rent an apartment, buy groceries, use public services, you have a stake in what happens there. The laws passed by state and local governments directly affect your daily life. In any functioning democracy, you should have the right to elect the people who make those laws.

What am I asking this question? Because New Hampshire politicians are once again proposing a law that would disenfranchise college students and exclude them from having a say in their local government. In January, Republican State Senator Victoria Sullivan introduced Senate Bill 223, which would amend New Hampshire's existing voter ID law to remove the ability to use college IDs to satisfy the requirement. This is particularly egregious for New Hampshire, which prides itself on having a citizen legislature (with 424 members, its legislature is the third largest in the English-speaking world). 

This bill is disguised as a proverbial trojan horse. After all, State Sen. Sullivan and her co-sponsors are simply asking that students gets a New Hampshire ID in order to vote in New Hampshire elections. However, this ignores the context in which this law exists and the decades long battle against student voting that has been waged by Republicans in the state. It also ignores the fundamental problem of every voter ID law, they exist to disenfranchise voters who cannot (for various reasons) get an ID. It's an additional barrier to exercising a fundamental right. 

But this is not an isolated occurrence, it's the latest in a decades long battle to curtail student voting rights in New Hampshire. Over the next few weeks, we'll explore this history and how it impacts the current battle.  

Twenty-Sixth Amendment and the Student Vote

The fight against student voting in New Hampshire dates back to 1971, when then-Attorney General (and future U.S. Senator) Warren Rudman took a hardline stance against allowing college students to register to vote in the state. The issue came to a head following that year's ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. In July of that year, Rudman issued a directive requiring college students to register in their hometowns rather than where they attended school. The New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union swiftly pledged to fight Rudman's directive, though they did not file their lawsuit immediately. 

Rudman reasoned that a college student's domicile remained in their parent's households, a rationale that is not applied to any other New Hampshire adult that moves out on their own at the age of 18. He also claimed that college students pay no taxes (presumably property tax since NH doesn't have an income or sales tax), a rationale that is not applied to any other New Hampshire renter. Rudman also said that he opposed letting people who are not in a community "permanently" to vote there, again a standard that is not applied to any other New Hampshire adult. 

There were other bizarre standards at play - opponents of student voting reasoned that college students were more informed about the issues where their parents are living than their college town. Even if this were true, knowledge of local affairs does not determine an individual's right to vote. In fact, I have met many adults who could not even name their state legislator. There were also tall tales (debunked by local officials) of Dartmouth College students flooding Hanover, NH town meetings and voting for absurd items like a subway system. Opponents seized on the idea of "temporary residents" radically changing the political affairs of small college towns. 

In the context of the time, it must have scared New Hampshire Republicans to have thousands of liberal college students added to the voter rolls. The country was in the midst of the Vietnam War and college students were both politically engaged and incredibly motivated to exercise their newly acquired right to vote. These political calculations undoubtedly led Rudman to advocate for disenfranching entire swaths of his state's population. 

Rudman's commitment to disenfranching college students even led him to threaten to criminally prosecute town officials who registered college students to vote and take the issue to the United States Supreme Court. He also accused the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union of having political motives for advocating for student voters. He was seemingly oblivious to the irony in his statement. 

Rudman even opposed compromise measures, such as HB 1029, which would have excluded college students from voting in local and municipal elections. 

By October 1971, Rudman was increasingly finding himself as a man on an island. Courts around the country (including in California, whose Attorney General took a similar stance to Rudman) had rejected the kinds of arguments that Rudman had advanced. According to the October 25th edition of the Concord Monitor, in New England, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut explicitly allowed college students to register to vote while a federal court case was pending and would soon be decided in Maine on the matter. Vermont had no explicit policy, but the state had given tacit approval to move forward with registering students to vote. Despite these setbacks, Rudman said that he did not plan to change his guidance. 

In December, the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union finally filed their lawsuit. 

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Here's what to expect in future parts:

Part II of this series will cover the outcomes of the legal actions against Rudman and the State of New Hampshire and their impacts on voting rights in New Hampshire. 

Part III will cover more contemporary battles, including the rise of voter ID and its usage as a vehicle to suppress the student vote. 

Part IV will cover the Chris Sununu era and the battle over college student voting in the late 2010s.  

Part V will wrap it all up and talk about the current struggle