Voting, How simple it should be!

It has been a very interesting week listening to talk radio.  The Supreme Court will not hear the 7 cases about same sex marriage, which I will definitely not try to touch, and there is a lot of talk about voting rights.  I was listening to Hannity on 890 am on my way to lunch.  There was talk about not allowing states to change their voting requirements this close to election.  I decided to pull up some additional information and by chance picked on The Christian Science Monitor link on our class home page.  An interesting topic stared me in the face, "College students: New Hampshire is trying to stop us from voting."  I thought to my self, this sounds interesting, this really sounds like a political argument he said she said debate of sorts.  Reading through the article New Hampshire is trying to change voter registration.  The article states that college students who are not from New Hampshire to prove residency will either have to get a New Hampshire driver's license or register their car.  

I find the title to this article interesting and fallacious.  New Hampshire is not trying to prevent college students from voting.  New Hampshire is requiring you to be registered to vote.  You can either vote where you are going to college or you can vote in your hometown.  You do however need to make wherever you are voting your legal domicile.  I found a few items that were helpful for me in trying to look at this article from many different angles.  USA.gov states, "To be eligible to vote, you must be a U.S. citizen. In most states, you must be 18 years old to vote, but some states do allow 17 years old to vote. States also have their own residency requirements to vote. For additional information about state-specific requirements and voter eligibility, contact your state election office."  In here it tells me States have their own residency requirements to vote.  I pulled up New Hampshire’s voting registrations requirements at sos.nh.gov.  These voter registration questions and answers tells us who can register to vote in New Hampshire along with their definition of domiciled. New Hampshire’s government website tells us that, "you can only register in the town or ward in which you are domiciled. Your domicile is that place, more than any other, where you sleep most nights of the year, or to which you intend to return after a temporary absence."  They also give examples of temporary absence specific to this article as, "teachers and students."  Meaning that if you are a student in New Hampshire with no intention of staying in New Hampshire and you have not legally changed your domicile, then you should not be voting in New Hampshire.  To me this makes cogent sense, you want to vote in a place where you will be living.  I am not living in New York why should I vote in the state of New York etc. You vote in your domicile because you want a say over what goes on in your neighborhood/ state.  I find it ridiculous that students who have no intention of living in a state are going to schools in that state just to vote, but then will not be there to live by the laws of the people who are elected.  With the majority of the states allowing absentee voting they will still have an opportunity to vote in a place they are domiciled. 

New Hampshire is not trying to prevent students from voting.  New Hampshire is asking those who will be domiciling in that state to register to vote, like USA.gov says by the rules of the state.  New Hampshire does not want people to vote in New Hampshire if they are only temporarily residing in New Hampshire.