Saturday Feb 13, 2016 · 9:00 AM EST
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Welcome to the return of our war on voting series, a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
There's nothing like the sense of entitled frustration expressed by "first in the nation" primary voters kept away from the polls by the decisions of lawmakers.
"I am still frustrated. I don't think that it was that I wasn't able to vote today," said one voter who was turned away from a polling location in Merrimac, the only polling location in the community of 18,000. Traffic getting to the high school was the problem. One woman said that it took her 40 minutes to go two miles, and she nearly gave up, reaching the polling location just as the doors were closed. "It's wrong," said this woman. "We're in America and we're allowed to vote. It's our right."
The polling location official was all apologies. "This year the tweak that we did was just wrong," she said. "It's up to make this work, and I hate it that anyone feels like they weren't able to vote." So yeah, that will probably be fixed. This, however, probably won't, because it got the desired results—preventing college kids from voting.
PLYMOUTH, NH — Plymouth State senior Jack Swymer headed to the polls around 11:30 a.m. to cast a ballot for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). He tried to take advantage of the state's same-day registration process, but a poll worker told him that since he didn’t have a proof of his residence, he couldn't vote.
"I live off-campus, and the bills are in my roommate's name," he told ThinkProgress. "I wasn't familiar with all the voting laws, so I just did what the poll workers' advice because I figured they knew what they were doing."
It turns out, they did not. […]
"All I wanted to do is vote," he said. "It's important for everyone to vote, but especially students. We are the future, and our voice should be heard."
Swymer was supposed to have been offered the opportunity to sign an affidavit and cast a provisional ballot. After being turned away the first time, he was informed of this right by volunteers from NextGen who were looking out for precisely this kind of problem, returned to the poll and demanded his ballot. The volunteers were there because of New Hampshire's new voter ID laws, and because this kind of voter suppression was entirely predictable. It's exactly what was intended by these laws, according to then House Speaker Bill O'Brien. He told a tea party group in 2011 that the "kids [are] coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. […] That's what kids do—they don't have life experience, and they just vote their feelings." Preventing college students from doing that is exactly what O'Brien wanted to stop.
Suburban white voters getting snarled in traffic wasn't intended, so that problem won't be repeated in New Hampshire in November. Keeping college students from voting, however, is not a bug, and it will happen again.
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/13/1484136/-This-week-in-the-war-on-voting-White-New-Hampshirites-discover-what-it-s-like-to-be-shut-out
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