After the massive voter registration drive that has consumed State College in recent months, those of us who spent our commute to class dodging kids with clipboards probably aren't apt to consider themselves "lucky."
However, that's exactly how a lot of other college students might see us. In 2004, after a voter drive registered 2,000 William and Mary students in Williamsburg, Va., the local registrar announced students could not vote there. You see, in Virginia, the law stipulates that voters must establish "domicile" in their precincts to register to vote there. Though homeless people can write down landmarks they live near in order to vote, the small town of Williamsburg apparently decided that dorm rooms don't count as a "domicile" and that students aren't really residents.
The new Williamsburg voting official, elected in 2007, told Time magazine that the town no longer restricts voters based on the domicile provision.
Still, the lesson from this Virginia town is that potential student voters are constantly at the mercy of local bureaucracies that could conveniently disenfranchise us.
Technically, they aren't supposed to -- the Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that all students have the right to vote where they attend college. However, because individual states and counties have a lot of room to interpret electoral guidelines, all sorts of measures that might indirectly curb student voting are at our local leaders' fingertips.
Recently, college towns in Virginia, South Carolina and Texas warned that students who register in their college town could be ineligible to be claimed as dependents on their parents' tax returns and might be in danger of losing tuition scholarships. The registrars backed off, Time reported, after student activists pointed out that their argument was dead wrong. But it's unavoidable that some students were scared away from voting.
Students in other states have been tripped up by local laws requiring them to present an in-state ID, which some out-of-state students just can't do. Beyond that, many precincts just aren't equipped to handle the massive student turnout expected this November, so many students' first voting experience will consist of long lines and mass confusion.
I make these points not to demonize local leaders -- many of whom, like those in State College, haven't made rules that get in the way of student voting. Rather, I'd like to point out students' apathetic reputations may not be entirely our fault. Which came first -- the disenchantment or the disenfranchisement? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
What we need to learn from other students' struggles is that such a thing can happen to us and we're very lucky that it hasn't.
Students are the only reason Centre County has a majority of registered Democrats, a fact that might not sit well with members of the opposing party occupying what were once "safe seats." It's easy to see where student-hampering laws originate amid permanent residents' bitterness over our extraordinary electoral sway.
But even if we don't live in our college towns more than four years, we are rent-paying, economy-boosting residents. While some students choose to cast absentee ballots in their home districts, the rest of us have every right to select our local and national leaders from where we currently live.
And now, more than ever, we can't let anyone take that right away.
It's my hope that the incredible student activism displayed in the voter registration drive sent a clear message to officials here and elsewhere -- that the student voice is powerful. If we vote in the same record-breaking numbers in which we registered, it would be near impossible for local laws to restrict student voting because of the threat of our collective wrath.
This is why we all must vote on Nov. 4, if for no other reason than because of how easily this right can be taken away.
Leslie Small is a senior majoring in journalism and is The Daily Collegian's Tuesday columnist. Her e-mail address is lcs5020@psu.edu.
