Galois

Disenfranchising College Students

Jonah Goldberg is not troubled in the least by creating biased standards of voter eligibilty in violaton of the fourteenth and twenty-sixth amendments to the US Constitution. It's fine with him if one disenfranchises college students because, hey, they might vote for socialists. And they might want to support the environment.

Goldberg was responding to this post by Nick Confessore at TAPPED which was itself a quick summary of this article in Rolling Stone by Damien Cave. Now Goldberg admits he didn't bother to read Cave's article, so maybe he was unaware that Cave is referring to blatant constitutional violations. Perhaps he was also unaware that in 1979 the Supreme Court summarily affirmed the decision of a three-judge District Court panel which established the right of college students to establish residency in the local college town. (For a detailed analysis of the case and a copy of the District Court injunction see this advisory opinion by Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbot.)

But forget about that pesty little thing called the US Constitution for a second. Maybe there are good reasons for disenfranchising college students. What are Goldberg's reasons? Well as noted before they might vote with the socialists, or otherwise vote for environmental friendly policies. Furthermore:

They don't care about property values, the quality of the schools, the business climate, the traditions, values, standards, prospects etc of the small town they're in -- at least not in the way residents who devote their lives and their children's upbringing do.

Yes because they might have different values or priorities than other town residents they should be disenfranchised. Oh yes and Goldberg says they are "spoiled." That's right spoiled rich kids shouldn't be able to vote. It's also okay to disenfranchise college students because they don't pay property tax. Forget for a moment that the fees the students pay for dorms are almost certainly affected by the rate of property tax. Haven't we been allowing people who don't own property to vote for awhile now? Now military bases are I believe exempt from local property taxes. Most military personnel are only stationed there for limited time periods. I wonder if Goldberg would like to disenfranchise those "tourists" as well.

As with military personnel, college students are not required to establish residency in their local towns if they do not wish to do so. Why might a college student be interested in voting where they go to school? Well, most students spend at least nine months a year at college. Even when they go elsewhere over the summer, it isn't necessarily to where their parents live. And according to this page by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts even the average Amerian family moves once every four years. Many college students do more volunteer work in the community than the "permanent residents". Issues such as zoning ordinances, the cost of off-camups housing, crime, and public transportation greatly affect college students. Gold erg even brings an example from a reader about college students helping to remove alcohol prohibitions from a county. I know when I was in college I would have been deeply interested in whether the sale of alcohol was legal. The reader complains that they don't have to worry about the increased crime due to the new law, but I fail to see how college students are unaffected by the crime rate.

I'm curious as to what Goldberg would have had me do. I grew up just outside of St. Louis, MO. I then went to school in Houston, TX for four years, followed by five years of school in New York, NY. The last three years I have been working in a three year post-doctoral postion just outside of New Haven, CT. And at the end of the summer I will be moving again. For the past twelve years, therefore, I have always lived with the understanding I would likely only be residing in that location for a limited time. Should I have been voting these past twelve years in Missouri, to where I'm only likely to ever return for brief visits to family? Yes, at times it's a little weird. In the 1992, 1996, and 2004 presidential elections I voted in one state in the primary/caucus only to vote in another state in November. I just turned thirty, but I have now voted in the primary or caucus of four different states. So perhaps I don't share all the same values of the permanent residents of a town, but my vote should count just the same.

Vieth v. Jubelirer

I should probably write something on today's Supreme Court decision in the case of Vieth v. Jubelirer which concerned political gerrymandering. I am strongly opposed to gerrymandering and this is a subject that interests me greatly. But I just don't have that much to say on the decision itself. The decision was not over whether gerrymandering is good for our democracy or even whether it is constitutional. Rather it was whether there were any standards the court could be guided by to even decide whether a given political gerrymandering scheme is constitutional. Four justices today believed there were none and a fifth (J. Kennedy) was only willing to say that none have been found yet. In effect, for now, the court has determined that the issue is nonjusticiable, that is it is not a proper issue for the court to decide on the merits. And I tend to agree with J. Scalia, who wrote the plurality decision for the court, that this isn't an issue the courts can address.

I do think people should be outraged, though, at was is going on in our country with political gerrymandering. Unfortunately today I don't have much to add to what I said back in February and back in December. Maybe I'll add some more thoughts later.

Update: For those interested in the impact of the decision itself and the justiciability question, check out Prof. Hasen's blog.

Borda Problems

At Crooked Timber, John Quiggin points out why the Borda voting system is fatally defective. The Borda system is one of many systems where candidates are ranked in order of preference by each voter. There are many equivalent ways of describing Borda, but one way is as follows. The last choice candidate gets zero points, the second-to-last gets one point, and so on up the line until your first choice gets (n-1) points (where n is the number of candidates). Whomever receives the most points wins. It's a rather easy to use, and to understand method, but as Quiggin points out the major problem is that by running more candidates a party gets an advantage. (Even if you allow only one candidate per party, the solution would be to run independents or create new "similar parties). This is sort of the reverse of the spoiler problem in a plurality system. A better system, in my view, is approval voting. Under this system you don't rank the candidates, but simply vote "yes" or "no" to each candidate. I hope to write more in the future on the advantages and disadvantage of such a system, but for now I'll just note that it avoids both the spoiler problem of our current system, and the reverse spoiler problem of Borda (both problems are examples of "clone-dependency"). If there are two front-runners you might still want to choose between a lesser-of-two-evils, but at least you can also vote for any candidates you like better as well.

Gerrymandering and Self-interest

Kevin Drum points out that partisan gerrymandering is probably opposed by almost everyone in the country, except for those that can actually do something about it: the politicians in power. I wrote about two possible solutions to this problem last December. One, advocated by Sebastian Holsclaw, is nonpartisan (race-blind) computer programmed districting. Such a system is currently used in Iowa. The other, which I would prefer and has been mentioned by Matt Yglesias, is multi-member districts.

Kevin points us to Legal Fiction which is rather pessimistic Congress will over do anything about this since the parties themselves have an interest in keeping safe seats. I think the battle is uphill, but has a chance. Congress managed to pass a campaign finance reform bill despite the convential wisdom that the parties had no interest in such reforms. What matters is getting the groundswell of support from the people. Even in a state where one party controls the districting, I think it's possible to convince people out of a sense of fairness to change the system. This is an area where a third party or independent candidate can at least push the issue forward.

Election Reforms

PinkDreamPoppies has an interesting post at Alas, a blog about some possible election reforms for President. It was intened to provoke discussion, so here's my contribution.

Term Limits I'm not thrilled with the idea of a one term president. Although election year politics are troublesome, I find the idea of an immediately unaccountable president even more troublesome. At least a president in his or her second term has a proven track record. I fear Bush may be even worse if he no longer needs to worry about reelection.

Electoral College I'm all for banning it, but it would take a constitutional ammendment that I believe will never pass. The small states don't have any incentive to give up their power and I doubt a sense of justice will convince them.

Required Voting I like the idea especially if combined with the suggestion of The "No" Vote. Of course if we are going to require voting (and even if we aren't) we should make it easier for people to be able to vote whether though extended poll hours, multiple voting days, vote-by-mail, etc.

Alternative Forms of Voting I'm all for approval voting. The idea is instead of voting for one candidate, you vote for any and all candidates you want to (or none at all). The candidate with the most votes wins. Suppose you like a third party candidate but are afraid of throwing away your vote? Vote for that candidate in addition to the one where you think your vote will make a difference.

Gerrymandering

Edward Lazarus has written a very nice FindLaw column about Vieth v. Jubelirer the case before the Supreme Court asking whether Pennsylvania's political gerrymandering is constitutional. Lazarus explains why the Supreme Court should intervene in this matter. Even if one thinks that gerrymandering is constitutionally permissible, though, there remains a concern that it is deeply troubling to our democracy and we should encourage political debate about this matter. As Lazarus writes:

All this makes the trip to the polling place a nearly pointless exercise -- except in a symbolic sense -- for tens of millions of voters.

Is it surprising then that voter turnout is so low in this country? One proposed solution is to adopt a system like that used in Iowa which uses four non-partisan criteria as a basis for districting plans. While this would be a marked improvement over what's happening in Texas, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, there is a better solution. Multi-member districts.
Matthew Yglesias wrote about this a few weeks ago. He suggested what is essentially a single transferable vote system (STV). There are other possibilities, but we need to start giving these ideas serious consideration.

In order for multi-member districts to be adopted we would need congress to remove the single-member district requirement from federal law. At that point any given state would be able to switch if it so desired. No amendment would be necessary. Regardless of the outcome in Vieth I hope it encourages more debate on this topic.