Today’s entry - How many students have 2 voter registrations? They can vote on campus and use the University address as their home address if they attend. Plus keep their parents 'home address' where they live. How can the board of elections check this out?
Bottom Line: Following my voter fraud in Palm Beach County story, which illustrated the extensive voter fraud perpetrated in the 2016 and 2018 elections, and fresh off of talking with the Public Interest Legal Foundation who said they’re currently auditing voter rolls in Broward, Miami-Dade and Hillsborough counties for similar irregularities, comes this question. With record numbers of colleges holding voter registration drives on campus, and some states allowing college addresses to be used as permanent addresses for voting purposes, you can see the opportunity for fraud to occur.
The proliferation of voter registration drives on college campuses and voter drives aimed at young adults are working. A recent study by Tufts University showed that voter participation by college students more than doubled from 2014 to 2018. In 2014, 19% of college students voted. That number hit 40% last year. That’s based on studying records of more than 10 million students across more than 1,000 colleges. Now, about the potential for voter fraud.
The first thing to know about college students voting is that it’s completely legal for students to vote from their college housing address, even if they are attending school from out of state. This was determined in a 1979 Supreme Court ruling Symm v. United States. Therefore, if college students aren’t voting in both their home state and location of their student housing, it’s legal.
In recent years, the only prosecuted case of voter fraud by a college student occurred in Virginia. A James Madison student illegally created 18 voter forms using the information of deceased individuals to cast additional votes in the 2016 election. Of course, what’s prosecuted vs what’s happening can be two different things. The question of multiple voter registrations by college students is part of a bigger conversation of duplicated voter registrations. It’s why it’s important that earlier this year Governor DeSantis announced Florida was joining the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). ERIC cross-references voter registration information across all participating states helping to ensure voters aren’t registered in multiple states and aiding in the cleaning of voter rolls with deceased voters. Florida is the 29th state to participate in the program.
As recently as 2012 the Pew Research Center discovered 2.75 million duplicate voters registered across the country. That was the impetus behind the creation of the ERIC which Florida is set to join.
The college population accounts for about 7.6% of the total adult population that’s eligible to vote. They’re 25% less likely to vote than the average adult. Using that information, there are an estimated 156,000 college students who’re registered to vote in multiple locations. Again, that doesn’t mean there’s anywhere near that type of fraud taking place, but rather the opportunity for it to potentially occur. Again, this is why ERIC is such a useful and important resource heading into the 2020 election cycle.
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