Word: voter
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...swamp of murky laws and logistical hurdles to get into the polling booths. But this year, amid students' record interest - and record primary turnout - experts say many campus precincts are sorely unprepared to meet student demand. And laws passed after the 2004 election, ostensibly to clamp down on voter fraud, could cause a slew of new problems that disproportionately hit student voters. Which means the question in 2008 isn't whether young voters deliver. "It's can the young voters deliver?" says Matthew Segal, executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment...
...principle, HAVA was expected to guard against further nightmarish scenarios like those encountered during the 2000 election. Centralized electronic voter databases combined with strict ID requirements, for instance, were meant to help generate “clean” voter lists free of duplicate or fraudulent entries. Meanwhile, provisional voting was instituted in the 2004 election as a solution for people who don’t meet requirements on Election...
...problem with the complexity and stringency of regulations is that “cleaning up” a voting roll can amount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Voter purges are already dangerous when spelling mistakes or address changes can accidentally render someone ineligible. Last week, we learned how they could be still more problematic, as county clerks mixed up fields on records, improperly consulted Social Security databases, skirted standard purging procedures, or illegally altered rolls within 90 days of an election. In Louisiana, for instance, approximately half the purges effected in the last five weeks have gone...
...Complicating the picture are the rigorous ID requirements for voter registering by mail, a problem that disproportionately affects college students. If the election office can’t contact the voter issuing a “flagged” application, he is either not added to the rolls (in states like Florida and Iowa) or has to vote by provisional ballot. That’s assuming that the flagged form is even processed before Election Day. When you add a college student’s need to vote absentee, the procedure gets even murkier...
...hearing in Congress three weeks ago, we heard clear solutions to free students from a jungle of election laws. Push for polling places at universities. Make university-issued photo ID an acceptable form of identification. Clarify residency rules on the universal voter registration form. Make forms and information easily available online. And as for HAVA, stop letting procedural errors disenfranchise people on the eve of landmark elections. These are all just causes, but they will only earn legitimacy if more students speak...