New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting (Part IV): documents, documents, and more documents

This is Part IV in my look at New Hampshire's history of attempting to disenfranchise college student voters. For Part I, which provides essential background information, please click here. You may read Part II here. You may read Part III here. 

"A resident or inhabitant or both of this state and of any city, town, or other political subdivision of this state shall be a person who is domiciled or has a place of abode or both in this state and in any city, town, or other political subdivision of this state, and who has, through all of his or her actions, demonstrated a current intent to designate that place of abode as his or her principal place of physical presence [for the indefinite future] to the exclusion of all others."

                                                                                                - New Hampshire House Bill 1264

In July 2018, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu signed a bill into law that amended the state's definition of "resident" for the purposes of voting. Despite a federal court clarifying that students could vote in the state and compromises being reached to make that happen, there were still some who felt that students were simply not welcome at the ballot box. On this day, those interests won. 

Prior to this change, an intent to remain in the state "indefinitely" was sufficient to be considered a resident for voting purposes. In practice, this shift in definition would effectively force out of state college students to get New Hampshire driver's licenses and register their vehicles in the state. Since these things cost money, these new requirements essentially amounted to a poll tax. Just as they had in 1971 and 1972, the New Hampshire chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union came out against the legislation and filed a lawsuit to stop it from going into effect. 

Widespread Opposition 

The bill had passed despite widespread opposition and warnings that it would disenfranchise college students. In fact, the original venue for the bill's July hearing before the Senate Election Law and Internal Affairs Committee was insufficient to hold the people who had turned up to oppose the bill. College students, facing disenfranchisement, showed up to show their opposition.

Many opponents zoomed in on the removal of intent to remain "indefinitely" from the state's election laws. While a federal court later ruled it was unnecessary, even the most ardent opponents of student voting in 1972 agreed that a statement of intent to remain indefinitely was sufficient. This legislation upended a status quo that had essentially persisted for the last 45 years.

SB 3 and the Turn Toward Enforcement

As a voter suppression effort, HB 1264 did not stand alone. It built directly on Senate Bill 3 signed into law the previous year. SB 3 altered the mechanics of voter registration by requiring voters who registered without documentation to complete detailed affidavits and submit proof of residency either at the polls or through post-election follow-up. Those who failed to provide documentation in a timely manner faced civil penalties and the possibility of criminal prosecution.

SB 3 did not explicitly target college students, but its effects fell most heavily on them. Students, who are more likely to register close to Election Day and less likely to have New Hampshire-specific documentation on hand were transformed from presumed eligible voters into legal risks. Civil rights groups warned that SB 3 converted routine voter registration into an act that could trigger investigation by the Secretary of State or referral to the Attorney General.

The New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union, along with other voting-rights advocates, sued to block SB 3’s enforcement. In October 2018, just weeks before the midterm election, a state court issued a preliminary injunction preventing the law’s new registration forms and enforcement provisions from being used. The court concluded that SB 3 imposed unreasonable burdens on the right to vote and risked confusion and disenfranchisement at polling places.

That injunction foreshadowed SB 3’s eventual demise. In 2021, the New Hampshire Supreme Court struck the law down in its entirety, holding that it violated the state constitution by placing disproportionate burdens on eligible voters without evidence of a meaningful fraud problem.

HB 1264, by contrast, survived judicial scrutiny. Because it altered definitions rather than election-day procedures, it was treated by courts as a permissible legislative clarification rather than an immediate burden on voting. The result was an uneven legal landscape: SB 3, which enforced residency claims at the polls, was enjoined and invalidated; HB 1264, which raised the cost and risk of making those claims in the first place, endured. 

After the New Hampshire Supreme Court issued a favorable advisory opinion regarding HB 1264, the lawsuits that sought to overturn it were withdrawn. It still stands to this day. The residency requirements imposed by HB 1264 survived, but the documentation requirements imposed by SB 3 did not. A college student registering to vote today may prove their identity and residency using documents provided by their college, satisfying the requirements of HB 1264.

Both laws were passed under the familiar banner of “preventing fraud.” In reality, they reflected a sustained effort to narrow the electorate by making student participation more expensive, more confusing, and more legally fraught.

The Broader Effort

Taken together, these measures represented the culmination of a long-running partisan effort to suppress the political power of those who live in New Hampshire but are not considered permanent enough to be trusted with a ballot. College students are undeniably present in the state for most of the year, and many will never return to their so-called “home” communities after graduation. Forcing them to vote in those communities compels them to participate in elections where the consequences of public policy may never touch them, while silencing them where those consequences most certainly will.

Part V, which will come next year, will examine the most recent updates.

New Hampshire (once again) tries to restrict student voting (Part III): The "problem" of student voting

This is Part III in my look at New Hampshire's history of attempting to disenfranchise college student voters. For Part I, which provides essential background information, please click here. You may read Part II here.

"Student Voting Rights Present Challenge for College Communities" 

This headline from the February 23, 2001, edition of The Valley News might appear preposterous at first glance. Imagine if this headline were written about any other community. Most people would be up in arms or at the very least confused. After all, the ability to influence the politics of your local community is a bedrock element of American democracy. Why are students any different? That question has driven years of policymaking and dialogue in New Hampshire. 

If there is one meta narrative of conservative New Hampshire politics over the last half-century, it's the feverish pursuit to figure out how students are different. The courts settling the question of student eligibility to vote did not stop people from trying to impede access to the ballot and it did not stop some people from perceiving students as "outsiders" who are trying to change the culture of their college towns. As an April 17, 2002, article in The Valley News noted, Republicans said that students should not be allowed to vote because their "votes can affect local elections."  Again, is that not the point of democracy? 

The narrative was clear, despite students spending money in local communities, they were not a part of that community. Again, a preposterous claim. How can you live somewhere for four years and not be a member of that community? 

The $10 Residency Tax: A Financial Barrier to the Ballot

In the early 1990s, several towns, including Hanover, home to Dartmouth College, had a $10 “residency tax.” In my research, I couldn't find it when it actually began. Though technically framed as a general municipal tax, it functioned as a de facto poll tax, falling heavily on college students who attempted to vote in local elections.

The issue came to a head during the 1992 election, when Dartmouth students were among those threatened with being denied the right to vote unless they paid the $10 fee.

Legal advocates, students, and civil liberties groups pointed out the obvious: this was a modern poll tax, applied in a way that discouraged transient, often younger voters who might lean progressive.

Public pressure mounted and by 1993, the Hanover Selectboard voted to abolish the $10 tax. But the damage had been done. The episode reinforced the idea that students, even when legally eligible to vote, were second-class citizens in the eyes of some local officials.

Students as “Outsiders”

The cultural narrative didn’t end with the repeal. It evolved. As an April 17, 2002 article in The Valley News recounted, some Republican leaders continued to argue that college students shouldn’t be allowed to vote because their “votes can affect local elections.”

Again, isn’t that the point?

This recurring claim that students shouldn’t vote because they might change outcomes underscores the deeper issue: students were (and often still are) seen as outsiders, regardless of how long they live, work, or participate in local life. Even students who spend four years in a community, longer than many military deployments or job assignments, are treated as though their presence is fleeting and their political preferences invalid.

It’s a paradox that continues to shape policy: students contribute economically, socially, and even civically, but they are often excluded from the political sphere because of who they are, not where they live.

From Cultural Resistance to Policy Pushback

The battles of the early 2000s reflected this tension. In towns like Durham and Keene, officials raised concerns about “student blocs” skewing town meetings or dominating turnout in close elections. In Hanover, Dartmouth students increasingly participated in local races, even running for office, prompting new calls to review voter rolls or tighten eligibility standards.

These efforts rarely resulted in legislation at the time, but they shaped the political discourse. They planted seeds for later laws that would impose document-heavy voter ID requirements, burdensome domicile definitions, and financial consequences for registering to vote in one’s college town. 

The rhetorical groundwork was already laid, if students are different, and if their votes “threaten” the balance of local politics, then the state has a vested interest in managing their access to the ballot.

The Voter ID Fight: 2011 and the “Feelings” Comment

By the early 2010s, efforts to discourage student voting had become more formalized. In 2012, the Republican-led legislature passed a voter ID law, overcoming Governor John Lynch's veto, requiring voters to present photo identification at the polls. Though framed as a measure to prevent fraud, the real intent behind the law became clear when House Speaker William O’Brien infamously said in a public forum that college students “just vote their feelings,” and that they "don't have life experience and they just vote their feelings and they’re taking away the townspeople’s vote.” That statement, widely reported at the time, was more than a gaffe, it revealed the underlying sentiment that student voters were not just inconvenient, but illegitimate.

I was a college student in New Hampshire when this debate was on-going. It started after the New Hampshire Republicans took control of the state legislature in the 2010 elections. Governor Lynch was the lone Democrat with any kind of real power in New Hampshire, and he was left to fight a tidal wave of bad Republican ideas.

For me, this was personal. 

I was interning for Governor Lynch on the day of the 2010 midterm elections. It was a somber feeling in the office, and we knew that change was on the horizon. I did not however expect to be told by New Hampshire Republican state leaders, many of whom I had met throughout the course of my internship, that people like me were not welcome to participate in New Hampshire's political discourse.

Despite interning in state government and participating in multiple political campaigns, my level of civic participation was not deemed, by some, to be enough to be allowed to participate in New Hampshire's state governance. 

Overcoming Governor Lynch's veto did require a student-friendly compromise: College IDs issued by college and universities in New Hampshire would be accepted. This concession kept the bill alive, but it didn’t undo the chilling effect the law had already created. These efforts sent a clear message: you are not welcome at the ballot box.

The Slow Burn of Suppression

Even without new laws on the books, the cultural resistance to student voting has a chilling effect. When voters are repeatedly told they don’t belong when they face extra questions at the polls, or hear that their ballots might be challenged, or are warned that they could owe fees or taxes — some will walk away.

That’s the real power of these policies. They do not need to block all student voters to be effective. They just need to discourage enough of them.

Look Ahead! 

• In Part IV, we’ll see how these cultural attitudes were codified into law during the Sununu administration.

• In Part V, we’ll examine how these policies continue to evolve, including 2025 legislation targeting student ID usage, and how young people are organizing to protect and expand their rights. 

Out of the wilderness

An extreme concentration of power and corruption is taking over our country like never before . . . and our political system is ill equipped to face this abuse of power.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking in front of a crowd in Greeley, Colorado.

In a time when the Trump Administration is kidnapping and attempting to deport lawful permanent residents for political stances; advocating for the takeover of other countries; unconstitutionally closing congressionally created agencies;  calling for the disbarment of a judge who blocked deportations; attempting to strip protections for federal workers; cancelling billions in already federally approved health grants; and disregarding a judicial order, the Democratic party needs to be clear about the vision of America that they can offer. 

The party's response has been underwhelming. In a town hall in Oregon City, Oregonians from rural and urban areas, were told by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Representative Janelle Bynum next to nothing of notable democratic resistance, instead being only “offered . . .  paltry suggestions to call [] representatives and vote blue next election cycle.” Chuck Schumer, after stating he would not vote for the Republican funding bill, voted for the Republican funding bill. 

It feels as if the mainline Democrats are operating as if it is business as usual, asking for voters to turn out in 2026 and 2028 in order to regain the House, Senate and White House. The party seem unable to face the facing the truth: that we are facing an ongoing existential threat to American Democracy. 

On the party's progressive flank however, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders are fighting back.

On March 21, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) stood in front of a crowd in Greeley, Colorado (population 108,795, in the conservative county of Weld). As a stop on their “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” the two progressive politicians, both east coasters, stood in front of a crowd of more than 10,000 Coloradans. 

The choice of Greeley for a progressive rally is strange. The next day, Bernie and AOC drew in record numbers in Denver, a city far more hospitable to progressives. With the larger city of Boulder nearby that is home to more Bernie/AOC supporters, why stop in Greeley? 

AOC and Bernie are making an argument: their leftist economic policies are popular in conservative areas like Weld County. The rally there continued a trend of large crowds showing up for Sanders and AOC in districts that voted Republican in 2024. As one Greeley resident stated “I didn’t think things like this happened in Greeley. People would always go to Fort Collins. So it’s just like a little bit of hope.”

One member of the crowd from the small town of Lyons remarked to Colorado Public Radio, "I'm really concerned about poor people in the United States, [the] working class. I'm really disappointed that the Democrats in some sense seem to have abandoned working-class people. And this is something I really admire about Bernie and AOC."

In a time where political commentators are decrying that Democrats are lost in the wilderness, AOC and Bernie Sanders have chosen a clear path out; leftist economic policy that will help the working class. In addition, they are asking for voters to engage in class solidarity.AOC said at the Greeley rally

Our task here is to build community. That's the deeper, deeper, deeper mission that we have . . . Because community is the most powerful building block we have against fascism, to defeat authoritarianism and to root out corruption.

In arguing for building community and engaging in solidarity, AOC has directly advocated for Trump voters and families of trans kids to organize together, admonishing that “this movement is not about partisan labels or purity tests . . . It’s about class solidarity. The thousands of people who came out here today to stand here together and say, ‘Our lives deserve dignity, and our work deserves respect.’”

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez to the Greeley crowd pointed out that Representatives Gabe Evans (recently elected Republican, whose district includes Greeley) and Representative Lauren Boebert (representing the adjacent district), voted to cut Medicaid.

In Colorado, Medicaid covers 1.2 million people. It is believed that cutting Medicaid coverage and funding for Colorado will “lead to clinics closing and more expensive care, particularly in rural areas of the state.”

The path of the current Administration will hurt all of us, not just Democrats or Republicans. Plans to privatize USPS will lead to “Approximately 51.3 million rural addresses . . . impacted” by the need to add surcharges to deliveries to rural people in order to be profitable. The closure of the Department of Education will harm rural areas by cutting necessary funding, or hampering the ability for funding to reach those areas. 

It might be tempting for urban Democrats to feel that voters deserve this in rural areas, since rural areas are more likely to vote Republican than urban ones. I diagree. Coalition building will take time, and it inherently means that Democrats and liberals and leftists will need to attract conservative voters and those who have supported Trump.

Multiple GOP lawmakers have been booed or jeered at in town halls with their constituents. With this, it seems there is an opening for a new coalition to be made. Rural and urban voters, Trump voters and Harris voters, will all need to come together in order to protect the working class, and save American democracy.

For a recent blog post about Sanders and AOC's "Fighting Oligarchy" tour, look here. For more blog posts about rural politics, rural areas being ignored by democrats, and democrats attempts to appeal in rural areas, look here, here, and here.

When will women in rural Missouri have true abortion access?

On November 5, 2024, as much of the country watched Donald Trump regain the presidency, abortion advocates in Missouri celebrated. Amendment 3, a ballot proposition to repeal Missouri's total abortion ban, had passed. Missouri was one of seven states that enacted amendments to protect abortion rights on November 5. And in a state that Donald Trump won by over 18 points, voters had somehow simultaneously restored the right to abortion by a narrow margin of 52 to 48 percent. For abortion advocates, passing Amendment 3 was a hard-fought but undeniable victory. 

Then, the question became: "What's next?"

For rural Missourians, the answer is complicated. Over the past few decades, Missouri has severely limited abortion access. Hit hardest were women in rural communities. For years, there were only three abortion clinics in Missouri, which has a population of over 6 million. By 2017, a Planned Parenthood in St. Louis was the only place in the entire state you could get a medical abortion. And in 2022, Missouri passed the "Right to Life of the Unborn Child Act," a trigger ban that months later became the first in the nation to go into effect when Dobbs v. Jackson overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. 

This was the landscape framing desperate efforts to restore medical access to abortion in Missouri. But celebrations fell quiet in weeks after the election as anti-abortion advocates began to respond. Elected officials in Missouri pledged to "vigorously defend" abortion bans in the state. On January 16, 2025, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced federal legislation to defund Planned Parenthood. I felt my own stomach churn when my little sister, a veterinary student at the University of Missouri, texted me: "I'm getting anxious. About living [here]." 

One-third of Missourians live in rural areas. But even those in urban counties have felt the effects of the decades-long effort to restrict access to abortion. Columbia, Missouri, where my sister lives, has a population of 130,000. But it's over a two hour drive to St. Louis, where the sole abortion provider in Missouri is located. Rural Ozark County ⁠— which has a 29.6 percent poverty rate, the highest in the state — is a four hour drive from St. Louis. Not to mention travel costs, medical expenses, and scraping together time off work — all challenges exacerbated by rurality.

While Amendment 3 granted abortion access until the point of fetal viability, the St. Louis Planned Parenthood cannot legally resume providing abortions. This is, in part, due to a December ruling by Jackson County Judge Jerri Zhang which upheld licensure requirements for abortion clinics — meaning that though Missourians have a renewed right to abortion, there is no place for them to obtain one. This leaves rural women in Missouri vulnerable, particularly those in the southern half, where the nearest abortion clinic might be several states away. 

However, progress was made: In the same opinion, Judge Zhang struck down other restrictive laws, including a 72-hour waiting period and a requirement that physicians who perform abortions have admitting privileges in all hospitals that provide obstetric or gynaecological care within "30 minutes or a 15-minute drive." Judge Zhang considered rural Missourians in the decision, writing that: 

[A] person who travels three hours to get a medication abortion and then returns home, would not benefit from [these restrictions]. If complications arise after taking the medication, the individual would need to seek emergency care at the nearest hospital emergency room, as with any other medical emergency.

Aside from the judiciary, what else can be done? In a state like Missouri, where only 28.9 percent of statewide legislators are women, many will turn to grassroots organizing. "What's Next?," an organization dedicated to improving abortion access in Missouri, has advocated for Know-Your-Rights Trainings and other local initiatives. In a 2024 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, over 35 percent of rural women reported they wouldn't know where to go or where to find abortion information. This post by Rooney Debutts details other statewide legislative efforts to improve abortion access. 

One thing is clear: The fight for abortion access in rural Missouri is far from over. 

Some rural voters resist school choice, prioritizing rural schools

Boone County, Iowa, October 19, 2024
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

The Wall Street Journal reported this week under the headline "Trump’s School-Choice Agenda Hits 

Pushback From Red-State Voters."  The gist of it is that some voters in "red states"--often thought of as synonymous with rurality--voted against school choice measures even as they supported Trump and his agenda, which includes "school choice."  Here's an excerpt from Matt Barnum's story: 

President-elect Donald Trump has made school choice a core tenet of his plan to remake education—but it isn’t clear his voters are on board.

Trump has indicated that he supports public funding of private schools and other options outside traditional school districts. “We will give all parents the right to choose another school for their children if they want,” Trump said in a campaign video. “It’s called school choice.”

Yet school-choice ballot measures lost in three states in the November election, including in two that went strongly for Trump, Kentucky and Nebraska. The results suggest a divide between Republican lawmakers and voters, many of whom have said in opinion surveys that they are generally dissatisfied with what they view as a “woke” agenda in public education but still like their own children’s local schools. 

To school-choice supporters—which include some parents, Republican politicians and conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation—subsidizing private or other options outside traditional school districts gives parents more say in their children’s education. Teachers unions, Democrats and some public-school parents say that giving families money to go elsewhere drains needed resources from public schools.

About a dozen prior posts linking so-called school choice to the well-being of rural schools--written over the course of more than a decade, are here.  

The school vouchers story I've been waiting for because it centers rural schools and communities

This excellent long read comes from Alec MacGillis for ProPublica, and it came to my attention only because it was on the New York Times audio site.   Bottom line:  rural folks, normally conservative, have lots of reasons to oppose conservative state leaders when it comes to school vouchers.  Why:  school vouchers, by depriving public schools of money, will lead to the closure of those schools.  Of course, school vouchers, by channeling public tax dollars to private schools, will hurt all public schools.  But rural schools are more vulnerable to falling student enrollment and therefore to closure.  All of that has big implications for rural communities.  I've blogged about this issue previously, such as here, here and here (among others) 

Following are some key quotes from the story, which features vignettes from rural parts of many states, including Ohio, Georgia, and Texas.  But first, there's this lede from Tennessee:

Drive an hour south of Nashville into the rolling countryside of Marshall County, Tennessee — past horse farms, mobile homes and McMansions — and you will arrive in Chapel Hill, population 1,796. It’s the birthplace of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. And it’s the home of Todd Warner, one of the most unlikely and important defenders of America’s besieged public schools.

Warner is the gregarious 53-year-old owner of PCS of TN, a 30-person company that does site grading for shopping centers and other construction projects. The second-term Republican state representative “absolutely” supports Donald Trump, who won Marshall County by 50 points in 2020. Warner likes to talk of the threats posed by culture-war bogeymen, such as critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion; and Shariah law.

And yet, one May afternoon in his office, under a TV playing Fox News and a mounted buck that he’d bagged in Alabama, he told me about his effort to halt Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s push for private school vouchers in Tennessee. Warner’s objections are rooted in the reality of his district: It contains not a single private school, so to Warner, taxpayer money for the new vouchers would clearly be flowing elsewhere, mostly to well-off families in metro Nashville, Memphis and other cities whose kids are already enrolled in private schools. Why should his small-town constituents be subsidizing the private education of metropolitan rich kids?

A further quote from Warner follows:   

I’m for less government, but it’s government’s role to provide a good public education.  If you want to send your kid to private school, then you should pay for it.

Here are some other excerpts, after McGillis notes that 11 states "now have "universal or near-universal vouchers, meaning that even affluent families can receive thousands of dollars toward their kids’ private school tuition" in the name of "school choice."  

Voucher advocates are "again and again ... running against rural Republicans like Warner," the Tennessee politician.  Those rural Republicans are also increasingly "joining forces with Democratic lawmakers in a rare bipartisan alliance.  That is, it’s the reddest regions of these red and purple states that are putting up some of the strongest resistance to the conservative assault on public schools."

Conservative orthodoxy at the national level holds that parents must be given an out from a failing public education system that force-feeds children progressive fads. But many rural Republican lawmakers have trouble reconciling this with the reality in their districts, where many public schools are not only the sole educational option, but also the largest employer and the hub of the community — where everyone goes for holiday concerts, Friday night football and basketball. Unlike schools in blue metro areas, rural schools mostly reopened for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020, and they are far less likely to be courting controversy on issues involving race and gender.

* * *

The response from voucher proponents to the resistance from fellow Republicans has taken several forms, all of which implicitly grant the critics’ case that voucher programs currently offer little benefit to rural areas. In some states, funding for vouchers is being paired with more money for public schools, to offer support for rural districts. In Ohio, voucher advocates are proposing to fund the construction of new private schools in rural areas where none exist, giving families places to use vouchers.

But the overriding Republican response to rural skeptics has been a political threat: Get with the program on vouchers, or else.

That’s what played out this year in Ohio’s 83rd District, in the state’s rural northwest.

* * * 

In Georgia, of the 15 Republican state representatives who blocked a voucher proposal last year, more than half came from rural areas with substantial Black populations. One of them was Gerald Greene, who spent more than three decades as a high school social studies teacher and has managed to survive as a Republican in his majority-Black district in the state’s southwestern corner after switching parties in 2010.

Greene believes vouchers will harm his district. It has a couple of small private schools in it or just outside it — with student bodies that are starkly more white than the district’s public schools — but the majority of his constituents rely on the public schools, and he worries that vouchers will leave less money for them.

The story next turns to Texas: 

The highest-profile rural Republican resistance to vouchers has come in Texas, the land of Friday Night Lights and far-flung oil country settlements where the public schools anchor communities.

* * * 

Among those [legislators] targeted was Drew Darby, who represents a sprawling 10-county district in West Texas and who frames the issue in starkly regional terms: The state’s metro areas depend on his constituents to provide “food, fiber and hide,” to “tend the oil wells and wind turbines to provide electricity to people who want to be just a little cooler in the cities.” But without good public schools, these rural areas will wither. “Robert Lee, Winters, Sterling, Blackwell,” he said, listing some hamlets — “these communities exist because they have strong public schools. They would literally not exist without a good public school system.”

* * * 

“In rural Texas, there’s not a whole lot of private school options, and we want our schools to get every dollar they can. This doesn’t add $1, and it’s not good for rural Texas.”

* * * 

But in Tennessee, Todd Warner and his allies staved off the threat again this year. To overcome rural resistance, voucher proponents in the Tennessee House felt the need to constrain them and pair them with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for public schools, but this was at odds with the state Senate’s more straightforward voucher legislation.

Then the story circles back to Warner, the rural Tennessee Republican, with a vignette hitting on rural intergenerational roots in a place:  

For Democratic voucher opponents in the state, the alliance with Warner and other rural Republicans was as helpful as it was unusual.

* * * 

Warner remains unfazed by all this. He is pretty sure that his voucher opposition in fact helped him win his seat in 2020, after the incumbent Republican voted for a pilot voucher system limited to Nashville and Memphis. And he notes that no one has registered to challenge him in the state’s Aug. 1 primary.

Warner is quoted as saying, with a chuckle,

They tried to find a primary opponent but couldn’t.  I was born and raised here all my life. My family’s been here since the 18th century. I won’t say I can’t be beat, but bring your big-boy pants and come on, let’s go.

I'm just remembering that my most recent post on "school choice" is here, out of my home state, Arkansas.  It links to prior related posts, too.  Those posts are about school choice in the context of consolidation.  But vouchers are now also a thing in Arkansas, and a rural school advocate and patron is among the plaintiffs challenging Arkansas' new LEARNS Act, a voucher program and the product of a big push by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Here's an October 2023 guest opinion piece in the Arkansas Times that makes the link between the LEARNS Act and the threat to rural Arkansas, "Disappearing towns: The LEARNS Act and the myth of schools as community panacea."  

Literary Ruralism (Part XLV): Heather Cox Richardson's Democracy Awakening

Here's an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson's 2023 book Democracy Awakening:  Notes on the State of America, about rural and urban power in relation to the founding of the United States and the structures the "founding fathers" put in place:  

States ratified the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791, and the framework for the United States of America was in place. The principles behind it were democratic—that every citizen should have an equal say in the government and that every citizen would be equal before the law—although its practice was almost exclusively limited to white men.

It was a “great experiment,” as first president George Washington called it shortly after he took the oath of office, but it had a crucial flaw: the Framers did not foresee the rise of political parties. They figured that, having thrown off monarchy, Americans would all agree on their form of government. To the degree that they disagreed, Framer James Madison argued in the famous essay “Federalist No. 10,” they would break into small factions and so cancel each other out, much—as the presence of many religious sects in the country ensured that none gained the upper hand over the others.

But partisanship appeared almost immediately. Southern leaders opposed Washington’s policies, conceived by Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, that strengthened the hand of northern businessmen in the national government. Virginians like Madison and Thomas Jefferson maintained that their opposition to such national power made them the true defenders of the Constitution.

Partisanship turned out to be an important innovation. It engaged ordinary voters and provided oversight of lawmakers, but it also weakened the nation’s framework, hampering representation and many of the checks the Framers had built into the system

The first thing to go was fair representation. By 1796, political leaders had divided into two camps, and Jefferson saw that he would have won the presidency if only Virginia's electors had all voted as a bloc in the Electoral College rather than splitting their votes between him and John Adams of Massachusetts. Jefferson urged Virginia to adopt a winner-takes-all system that would give all of the state’s electoral votes to whichever candidate got a simple majority. It was a stunning change and one that appalled Madison, who wanted to amend the Constitution to prevent it. He died before he could get such an amendment ratified, and other states quickly followed Virginia, manipulating the new system to give their own top candidates a leg up. Today, only Maine and Nebraska still split their electoral votes, with the result that candidates campaign almost exclusively in states with large electoral vote counts.

The Framers also did not foresee—although this, perhaps, they should have—that eventually, politicians desperate to keep their party in power would add new, sparsely populated states to the Union, as the Republican Party did when it brought six new states into the country between 1889 and 1890. They were quite open that their goal was to make sure they controlled the Senate in order to stop legislation they didn’t like, even if the American people wanted it.

The Framers also did not foresee the growth of vast cities, possible thanks to modern industry—including steel—and transportation. They could never have imagined the astounding size differences that would develop in the modern era between states like California, which according to the 2020 census has almost forty million people, and Wyoming, which has fewer than six hundred thousand.

Living in small, largely rural states, the Framers put a lower limit but no upper limit on representation. When the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans for the first time, the House in 1921 capped its numbers at 438 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, whom lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today, the average congressional district is 761,169 individuals, which both makes representation less effective and reduces the power of states with more people.

The government that the Framers designed, hammered out by fifty-five young white men sweltering in Philadelphia in summer 1878 to permit individuals to have an equal say in their government without succumbing to tyranny, was an astonishing feat, but it was not perfect.

Fortunately, the Framers recognized that their work would need adjustment. They wrote into the Constitution that future generations could amend it.

(pp. 185-186; emphasis mine).

New podcast examines links between far-right militias and law enforcement in rural upstate New York

Read more about the series from North Country Country Public Radio. 

Far-right extremism is thriving in small, rural communities across the country, gaining the support of mainstream voters and local law enforcement. In this podcast from North Country Public Radio, reporters Emily Russell and Zach Hirsch investigate extremist groups and militia movements in northern New York State, why they’re drawing support, and what kinds of threats they pose at a pivotal moment for democracy in the United States.

The episodes will be available on January 15.  

Small-town government run amok (Part XII): Who and what were behind the police raid of a small-town newspaper in Kansas?

This story out of Marion, Kansas, population 1,922, made big national headlines two weeks ago when police raided the local newspaper, the Marion Record, as well as the home of its publisher  The reason these events attracted so much attention, of course, is that the law does not typically permit prior restraints of media in the United States--and thus we don't tend to permit seizure of journalists' notes and tools.  After-publication liability can attach if, for example, a publication runs afoul of defamation law or some other laws. 

Since these dramatic events unfolded in Kansas, catapulting little Marion onto the world stage, national media have been revisiting the "scene of the crime" to reveal who and what were behind the raid.  What evidence justified the search warrant?  Early reports suggested that it came down to a dispute between the newspaper and the owner of a local business, Kari Newell, over a DUI she got 15 years ago, which caused her to lose her driver's license for a time.    

OK, I thought, but a local judge and local police still had to get involved for the raid to have occurred, which caused me to file these events temporarily under my "small town government run amok" folder.  This is my mental category for events when small-ish local governments do knuckle headed things--often unconstitutional things--because no one is watching the watchers.  That is, the officials aren't getting legal counsel or don't, for example, have a lawyer present to advise when decisions are being made.  In this case, though, a magistrate judge (with a law degree), Laura E. Viar of Kansas Eighth Judicial District, approved the police chief's request to search the offices of the newspaper and the homes of the newspaper editor and a councilwoman.  The judge granted that search warrant based on evidence suggesting unlawful use of a computer and identity theft, the latter being a felony.  (I note that in this district, the means of ascending to the bench is through "assisted appointment" and that Judge Viar is not listed on the ballotpedia webpage, though she is listed on the government webpage of the Eighth Judicial District).

The facts underlying that allegation were that a Marion Record reporter had checked the accuracy of an allegation about Newell, a local business woman, whose past DUI and loss of driver's license, the journalist was investigating.  The reporter did so by entering information gleaned from a screenshot purporting to document Newell's DUI and entering those details into a state government website to confirm Newell's loss of license.  Newell's old DUI and loss of license were of public interest only inasmuch as she was applying for a liquor license for her restaurant.  Nevertheless, the newspaper did not publish a story about the restauranteur's DUI. 

It appears that the judge, having the police department appear ex parte seeking the search warrant, never considered the first amendment implications of the warrant she signed off on.  That's a pretty significant oversight given how relatively little was at stake for Newell, the victim of the alleged identity thefl. 

Some of this detail is revealed in this Washington Post feature, published just this weekend, which provides the most detailed back story I've seen so far on these events.  It it a tale rich with rural and small-town themes, including lack of anonymity.  Here's the lede:

The phone conversation between the journalist and the town’s newly hired police chief quickly turned contentious.

Tipsters had been telling Deb Gruver that Gideon Cody left the police department in Kansas City, Mo., under a cloud, supposedly threatened with demotion. So now she was asking him difficult questions on behalf of the weekly Marion County Record about the career change that had brought him to this prairie community of 1,900 people.

The chief bristled.

“If you’re going to be writing bad things about me,” they both recall him telling the reporter, “I might just not take the job.”

He also advised Gruver that he had hired a lawyer.

Cody later said he had been on guard during the conversation, having been warned by longtime residents that the Record could be overly aggressive in its reporting.

“If you live in Marion, you understand,” he told The Washington Post. “If you don’t live in Marion, you don’t understand.”

Gruver wouldn’t publish any of her reporting on Cody for months to come. But their confrontation in April marked an escalation in long-running tensions between a group of local journalists and the officials and community members they cover that would boil over through the summer.

The small-town intrigue might have stayed in a small town, though, had Cody not initiated a dramatic step earlier this month. Responding to a local businesswoman’s allegation that the paper had illegally accessed her driving record, Cody obtained search warrants from a magistrate judge and led half a dozen officers on an Aug. 11 raid of the Record’s offices and the home of its editor and publisher — seizing computers, servers, cellphones and other files.

* * * 

Cody, 54, officially assumed his post in June. Shortly thereafter, he ordered his deputies to stop sending daily police activity logs to the Record.

Crime is infrequent in Marion, but the Record had consistently published these weekly reports — detailing every minor traffic accident police responded to, every report of wandering cattle — for decades. Cody told The Post that his review led him to believe these disclosures could violate privacy laws. In response, the paper began publishing a pointed notice where the reports had formerly appeared: “Chief Gideon Cody has ceased providing a weekly report of police activities.”

The story later suggests that Cody was motivated to seize the Record's computers not to vindicate restauranteur Newell, but because the computers would reveal details of who had made allegations against the police chief himself.  

And then there's this sort of "last chapter," involving someone else in Marion County who has a law degree and should understand the constitutional implications of what transpired with the newspaper seizures:  

Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey announced five days after the raid that he would withdraw Cody’s warrant and return the seized items to Meyer and his staff.

The announcement seemed to amount to an admission that the now-infamous raid had been a mistake. Ensey said in a statement that there had been “insufficient evidence” to justify a raid on the searched locations or to connect the sought-after items with an alleged crime.

You can read earlier coverage of these events here, here and here.  The last of these, from the Kansas City Star, alleges Marion County Sheriff copied the newspaper's hard drive before returning it and that the county is being asked to destroy that copy.

It all makes me wonder what sort of legal advice Marion County and the City of Marion are getting now, as they face fall-out from the raid--a raid that, incidentally, appears to have led to the death of one of the newspaper's owners/publishers/editors, a 98-year-old woman whose house was searched in the initial raid.  

Shasta County, California declares itself a 2d amendment sanctuary

Jessica Garrison reported a few days ago for the Los Angeles Times under the headline, "Shasta supervisors declare county a 2nd Amendment fortress in ‘war on guns.’"  Here's the lede:  

After gaining national attention for dumping Dominion Voting Systems and becoming the largest entity in the United States to resort to hand-counting ballots, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday waded into another issue roiling right-wing America: an unwavering defense of gun rights.

By a 4-0 vote, the board approved a resolution declaring that the county would “use all lawful means at its disposal to support and defend the Second Amendment.”

Supervisor Patrick Jones, whose day job is managing his family’s gun store in Redding, said the largely symbolic measure was necessary because the 2nd Amendment in California has been treated as a “second-class right,” with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and other lawmakers in Sacramento making frequent efforts at stricter gun control.

The resolution had come before the board earlier this year in a more dramatic form. Jones introduced a measure in February that had been drafted by the California Rifle and Pistol Assn.

As originally drafted, the resolution called for county employees to review the county’s support for the 2nd Amendment every year. It also gave the Board of Supervisors, and county staff, “the right not to enforce” any state or federal laws that they deemed a violation of the 2nd Amendment “as originally written and intended.”

Here's a quote from Supervisor Mary Rickert, who runs a ranch and who voted against the measure, noting that her husband "has a shotgun by the door tonight.  That shotgun is going to be there tomorrow."  In other words, she doesn't believe anyone is coming for Shasta County's guns. 

And here's more from the story on the resolution itself: 

The measure that came before supervisors Tuesday had been significantly reworked with the input of the county’s lawyers. ...

The new resolution clarifies that the county intends to adhere to state and federal laws. But it also takes sharp aim at the whole concept of gun control and questions the motivations behind persistent calls from Newsom and fellow Democrats for stricter regulation for firearms.

“The Board of Supervisors believes that the California Legislature has passed laws that will be determined to be unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, and continues to pass laws that will be determined to infringe, unconstitutionally, upon people’s rights under the Second Amendment,” reads one article in the lengthy resolution.

You'll find many more posts about Shasta County on this blog. 

Postscript:  Here's Susanne Baremore's essay in the Los Angeles Times commented on the Shasta County move. Baremore, a resident of Redding, the county seat, and "concerned citizen" writes: 

In any other county, a resolution proclaiming a 2nd Amendment sanctuary might have been interpreted as a routine symbolic gesture allowing veterans, gun owners and sundry other “patriots” a public moment of pride in their heritage and rural lifestyle. In Shasta County, which passed such a resolution this week, there is a lot more to it.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shasta County’s Board of Supervisors has made global headlines for strange happenings and curious decisions.

* * *

The Board of Supervisors is currently led by a 3-2 majority that is ideologically further right than anything that used to be called Republican. Its members are also extreme examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, whereby a lack of knowledge leads to an overestimation of one’s competence.

* * *

The collective dysfunction of this governing board has led to an effort to recall one narrowly elected member of the far-right majority, Kevin Crye, as well as an exodus of the county’s top leaders and talent.

* * *

We can’t know what effect the supervisors’ latest questionable decision will have for the people they ostensibly represent, but we do know that it’s promoting the lawless use of firearms in a community primed for extremism and violence.

New (sub)-California secession movement rises in exurban Sacramento

Eric Ting reports for the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline,  'This state is under tyranny': Scenes from California's latest secession movement.  Some excerpts follow:  

Sharon Durst, leader of the secessionist El Dorado state movement, knows people don't take attempts like hers seriously. Past efforts to split rural California counties off from the rest of the state have accomplished little beyond inspiring ridicule — which the former rancher, now in her 80s, experienced directly as an early supporter of the infamous state of Jefferson.

But Durst also knows that something has to change, if rural counties like El Dorado are going to have a fair say in how they’re governed. On July 10, she and former county Supervisor Ray Nutting co-hosted a town hall to explain to their neighbors why the solution is peeling the county off from California and forming a new state.

It’s true that California has a unique problem of representation in state government. No state in the country has fewer state legislators per capita; the problem is especially stark in rural areas like El Dorado County, population 192,000. In the state Senate, El Dorado is represented by a legislator who also represents voters in 12 other counties; in the state Assembly, the county is split between two legislators, each responsible for voters across several counties, with widely diverging industries and demographics. Not one of the three legislators responsible for representing El Dorado County actually lives there.

The story features a long quote from Professor Isaac Hale of Occidental College, who teaches politics: 

This has long been an ongoing problem in California politics.  There are nearly 500,000 Californians per assemblymember and a million Californians per state senator, and that’s pretty out of whack.

You could double the size of the Assembly, and we’d still have the highest number of people represented by district.  And there are serious consequences to this.

Ting explains the consequences for rural folks in the Golden State:  they feel disenfranched--disenfranchised enough to show up at long town halls to talk about secession.  That said, Ting reports that 25 people showed up for a July 10 gathering held by Durst and Nutting.  And that doesn't sound like a very robust group in the context of a county with nearly 200K residents.  Also, interestingly, the meeting was held at a Raley's Supermarket in El Dorado Hills--the posh planned community at the western edge of the county, just over the Sacramento County line.  In other words, El Dorado Hills is the part of the county one would expect to be least amenable to a secession movement.  (Here is a prior post about El Dorado Hills as magnet for Bay Area migrants during the pandemic.)  Still, here is Ting's description of the crowd: 

The political leanings of those in attendance were on full display. One attendee wore a shirt that helpfully defined the word “patriot.” Another wore a shirt reading “Save the Children” on the front and “WE RIDE AT DAWN” in all caps on the back. Durst’s introduction was punctuated by audience member comments, including “California is red, we all know it,” and “Trump won.” When she mentioned that a reporter was in the audience, the room broke out into groans, like someone had just offered the restive crowd Bud Light from the supermarket outside the meeting room.

Here's what Ting has to say about the current movement's approach to change, including its legal theory: 

Durst and Nutting concede California lawmakers would never go along with it, so Durst is gambling on what she described as a “backdoor” maneuver to go to Congress directly.

In a 7,000-word Substack post published in May, Durst argues that El Dorado County is technically not a legitimate piece of California and is instead “other property” of Congress (though she cites no legal scholars or historians who have promulgated this view). Therefore, she wrote, Congress alone could vote to turn El Dorado County into El Dorado state, without California’s approval.

Durst refused to discuss procedural steps at the meeting. Ting quotes her:

To try to speculate, ‘What if this? What if that? Blah blah blah?’ No. You know what? We’re going to just move forward, do our thing, hope for the best and see where the people take it.

Durst was also uninterested in alternative paths to improve rural representation, including those that might garner bipartisan support because they also afflict metropolitan areas.  Professor Hale provided this illustration as an urban counterpart to what is annoying this small band of folks in El Dorado County: 

Consider Mia Bonta’s East Bay Assembly district.  Why are wealthy homeowners in Piedmont linked with renters in east and west Oakland? They have wildly different interests, and you could make the argument that they each should have their own form of representation. This is a systemic problem.

The story closes with this quote from Durst:  

I’m not going to petition anyone in California. I’m going to absolutely ignore California, as if there’s a barrier between our border and California.

Don't miss this entire, deeply reported San Francisco Chronicle story, not least for its rich descriptions of some other El Dorado County residents who attended the meeting, as well as a bit of backstory on Nutting. (Read more here from a 2014 court adjudication against him).  

Prior posts about secession from California are here, here, here (featuring many photos, including one taken in El Dorado County), here, here (speaking specifically to representation issues, from 2015), here (based on a story in Harper's Magazine), here (comparing the State of Jefferson movement to the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia), and here (reporting on a 2018 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that rejected a legal theory that Californians are underrepresented because of the too-small size of the late legislative body).  Another post regarding frustration over lack of representation, this one out of Siskiyou County in the traditional State of Jefferson territory, is here.

Other posts featuring El Dorado County more generally are here (coronavirus pandemic), here (a food sovereignty movement post from 2012), here (suburban sprawl), and here (resisting the siting of a Dollar General Store).   This is about a Tea Party Meeting in the county in 2012.  This, also from 2012, features a campaign sign for a member of the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors that uses the slogan "Protecting Rural Values."). Another 2012 photo from El Dorado County is here--this one of a sign advertising a Gold Prospecting Summit at the county fairgrounds. 

Posts about other proposals to divide California are here and here.