students

Great, great story on young voters and Students for Barack Obama in the Wall Street Journal. This may be the first piece I've seen that really picks up on what peer to peer organizing, applied at the local level, is all about:

Barack Obama's chances of winning the presidency could rest on the votes of 20-to-30-year-olds -- and, to an unprecedented degree, he is letting his young supporters decide how to win those votes.
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At the University of Detroit Mercy, Lauren Wolfe, a 25-year-old superdelegate, set out cautiously with her clipboard to hit the bars to register Democrats to vote. Wayne County, which houses the university, has more than 1,400 businesses licensed to sell alcohol.

"We were shocked by the amount of people that really responded," says Ms. Wolfe. "We had one guy who had just moved from New York and knew that his vote in New York didn't mean as much as it did in Michigan. He was like, 'I'm so glad that you guys are here because I probably never would have actually switched my registration.'"

In Oregon, music and arts-based approaches have been more effective. At one Oregon university, students set up a party tent with an artist who painted murals of Sen. Obama. Whoever registered to vote at the tent was invited to sign the mural. The setup drew more students and eventually local musicians who would perform and attract more young voters, says Ms. Arsenault.

"In this campaign they gave students the ability to actually recognize what was needed," says Molly Kawahata, an 18-year-old convention delegate from California and an incoming freshman at University of California, Berkeley.
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In part, the local-autonomy approach emerged from lessons learned during the primary season. Student organizers at Boston College, for instance, gathered students to canvass community colleges in nearby Berlin and Manchester, N.H., says Joshua Darr, the 21-year-old Massachusetts director of Students for Barack Obama.

"The Obama campaign has really trusted students to organize their own campuses and that's very encouraging," says Mr. Darr.

Hell yeah - providing the resources to let young people organize how they know best in their communities. As long as you add in tracking and accountability, this is the way that youth organizing should work. All Democratic campaigns, and all Democratic state and local parties, should have similar organizing strategies for youth. As should outside organizations that work in support of the party and its candidates. This shouldn't just be the work of one campaign.

On a related note, I was able to sit down with Leigh Arsenault at the Democratic Convention and was super happy with what she had to say about how they will be organizing on campuses (above), the number of organizers they are hiring, and how they'll be working off campus to reach non-college youth, and making targeted ad buys aimed at youth. I'm not a huge fan of media buys if it comes at the expense of field, but that doesn't seem like it is at all happening, and I'm very curious to see if someone can produce some real research as to what targeted ads on Comedy Central, MTV and/or Cartoon Network might produce.

Good stuff all around. More on the Obama youth plan once I have another chance to touch base with the campaign.

There's an important story in the New York Times today about student voting rights. Down in Prairie View Texas, two voting rights cases are underway. The first involves the use of voter fraud charges by the Attorney General to intimidate black and hispanic (Democratic) voters in the country. Recent reports indicate that of 26 voter fraud cases brought by the Attorney General, all were against Democrats and almost all were against black or hispanic voters.

The second involves hundreds of students who were denied their right to vote in 2006:

Before the 2006 election, Judge Charleston said in an interview, he personally registered about 1,000 students. But on Election Day, he said, hundreds of them were turned away as not registered to vote. The registration cards were later found in county offices, he said.

Ellen C. Shelburne, the county tax assessor and registrar, who took office in January 2007, said she had recently been questioned by investigators from Mr. Abbott’s office and had told them that she knew nothing about the matter. Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for Mr. Abbott, said, “We cannot comment on ongoing investigations.”

Waller County has a long history of voter suppression, but we don't have to go back all that far to know that this will be important in November. During the primaries, Waller County purposefully tried to discourage student voting by locating early voting locations far from campus at the county seat. Students protested that decision at the time and marched over 7 miles to cast their ballots:

I expect tactics like this will become common in many places this November, particularly after the Supreme Court issued its ruling on the Indiana voter ID law. Student voter suppression happens every year. It occurred in 2004, it occurred in 2006, and those were elections cycles in which most of the political class did not think the youth vote would matter.

This year, the youth vote could be up to 25% of the electorate and will likely vote around 66 - 33 Democratic. Does anyone have doubts that the Republicans will do all they can to suppress that vote?

Graduating students at Yale did not take kindly to a speech delivered this weekend on "Class Day" - one of the many events involved in the Yale commencement weekend. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered the address, and his presence was protested by a number of students due to his support of the war in Iraq:

Mr Blair's arrival was met by a small but vocal contingent of protestors waving placards that read "No to Blair" and "Yale! Don't Support a War Criminal", but police held them back from the ceremony, which was held in a large gated garden.

But as he took to the podium, Mr Blair, 54, was met with dozens of red signs that students had hidden under their graduation robes, reading "Peace Now" and "No War".

One student, a young woman wearing a headscarf, stood throughout the ceremony, holding a "Peace Now" sign above her head just 10ft in front of the former Prime Minister, who appeared to be doing his best to avoid looking at her.

Mr Blair also avoided referring to Iraq by name as he talked about the rise of India and China as future world superpowers, the problem of climate change, and the threat of "terrorism fueled by religion".

Normally I'm skeptical of student anti-war protests. While throwing a pie in Tom Friedman's face might be emotionally satisfying on some level, it accomplishes very little in the way of real change. In recent years, students have achieved far greater success on campus when their protests were directed at their college or university. Over the past half decade, student protests have helped establish a living wage for workers at Harvard, many campuses, bowing to student pressure have divested from regimes involved in human rights abuses, and many more campuses have made strides toward becoming carbon neutral thanks to the pressure of students. The same cannot be said of student anti-war efforts.

That may be changing. Over the course of the last year, a number of high-profile war supporters have found less than hospitable environments on the campuses of America's high schools and universities. Earlier this year students at the elite boarding school Choate successfully protested plans to have Karl Rove deliver their commencement address, and Alberto Gonzalez, the disgraced former Attorney General, has found it quite difficult to raise money for his legal defense fund via speaking engagements on campuses.

One of the great traditions of politics is that after you work your ass off in the White House or some appropriately high-level government position for 5 - 8 years, you get to retire, write a book, teach or consult a little, and deliver speeches all over the country. All of these tend to pay pretty well, compensating the writer/teacher/lecturer admirably for their many years of service for which they were compensated well below their earnings potential. For a select few - most recently President Clinton who earned millions on the lecture circuit after his retirement - it's the cherry on top of the pie of a career government service.

Denying government officials like Rove, Gonzalez, and even Tony Blair, lucrative speaking engagements and high profile awards like honorary degrees won't stop the war. But at least it effectively hits those who supported the war where it hurts - in their pocketbooks and reputations. That's a whole lot better then just some pie in the face.

From a press release I just received from Student PIRG:

Student PIRG New Voters Project staff stationed at polling locations near Indiana campuses today are beginning to hear from young voters turned away at the polls for a failure to meet voter identification laws upheld by the Supreme Court last week. The law, which requires voters to possess in-state or federal identification, such as an Indiana Driver’s License or federal passport, has been widely criticized for creating additional voting barriers. Three incidents of student voters turned away from the polls documented by Student PIRG staff in past two hours are included below. To contact profiled voters, please contact Sujatha Jahagirdar at (323) 309 6120.

19-year old Angela Hiss, a sophomore and computer science major at the University of Notre Dame, was turned away from the polls this afternoon as she attempted to vote in her first election. After arriving at her polling location, she presented several forms of identification - her school ID, a piece of mail that showed her campus address and an Illinois driver’s license – but was misinformed that she could not vote because she could not show in-state ID. Poll-workers, according to Hiss, also did not advise her that she could cast a provisional ballot, as required by state and federal law. Instead, they suggested visiting local Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain the in-state identification required by Indiana’s newly-upheld law, an endeavor that could take hours, she explained. Furthermore, while the law allows her ten days to obtain the required ID from the DMV, Hiss’s travel plans will not give her time. As a result, she said, she will not be able to vote in the primary.

19-year old Allyson Miller, a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame and volunteer at a local children’s clinic was similarly turned away from the polls today. An Indiana resident since the age of five, Miller left her driver’s license in her dorm room, and arrived straight from class at the polls with her school ID and registration confirmation papers from the County Registrar. Upon arriving, however, poll-workers did not allow her to vote without a state-issued ID. “I plan to come back because voting is a big deal to me,” said Miller, “but it’s a huge inconvenience, especially with a final tomorrow.”

19-year old Becky Jenkins, a sophomore and member of the tennis team at Butler University was also unable to vote in her first election today. “I didn’t know that I had to have an Indiana ID,” she said after she was turned away from the polls for attempting to cast her ballot using a driver’s licenses issued by the State of Illinois. When asked if she would instead cast a provisional ballot, Jenkins also said her travel plans wouldn’t allow her to.

Update: Cliff Schecter notes that Sen. Obama has condemned the decision, but Sen. Clinton, who stands to benefit most from depressed youth turnout, is mum. Curious. And disappointing.
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As you may have heard, the Supreme Court issued a decision today upholding Indiana's photo ID law. By a vote of 6 - 3 the court determined that Indiana's photo ID law, which requires all voters have a valid government issued photo ID listing their current address, was necessary to prevent voter fraud. This, despite the fact that the court admitted there was no evidence of such fraud ever taking place in Indiana.

This ruling could have potentially huge repercussions in the upcoming Indiana Primary. According to Rock the Vote polling data, almost 1 in 5 18 - 29 year olds do not own valid photo ID listing their most recent address. Young voters are highly transient. We move from state to state, town to town, dorm to dorm for years. I'm 29 years old and I've lived in 9 different residences and 3 different states in the last 12 years. I'm about as politically active as you can be, but under such stringent photo-ID laws, I probably would not have been able to vote at least 9 of those years.

Worse, the ruling not only applied to Indiana but left the door wide open for similar challenges in other states - creating the potential for a landslide of voter suppression in the November election.

This could be a huge deal if Republicans play hardball (and when don't they play hardball). Let me repeat, Rock the Vote estimates that this could disenfranchise 1 in 5 young voters. That's huge - millions of people huge - particularly in a year where we are seeing incredible gains in youth participation.

Rock the Vote sent out an email noting the backwards thinking in the Supreme Court's decision:

) The Court admits in its ruling that the reasoning behind imposing this strict law – the desire to prevent voter fraud – was inapplicable in Indiana. In its ruling, the Court stated "the record contains no evidence that the fraud…in-person voter impersonation at polling places – has actually occurred in Indiana…" (page 2, emphasis added)

2) The Court also downgrades the constitutional right to vote. Justice Scalia, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, stated "petitioners' premise that the voter-identification law might have imposed a special burden on some voters is irrelevant." (page 3, emphasis added)

3) Finally, the Court states that the burden of obtaining this identification is not "a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting" (page 3), reiterating the sentiment behind the Seventh Circuit's shocking statement that voters who do not obtain the required identification are choosing to "disenfranchise themselves" rather than go to "the expense of obtaining a photo ID." (Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd., 472 F.3d 949, 952 (7th Cir. 2007), cert. granted, 168 L. Ed 2d 809 (2007))

The ACLU, Rock the Vote, YDA, Common Cause, and Speaker Pelosi's office have all issued statements (though some curiously leave young people out of the affected constituencies.

Shorter version: this is bad.

Update II: Got the video up and working again.

Update: Grrrrr......looks like the video got removed from YouTube. Basically, in so many words, Rendell said that young voters were drinking the Obama Kool-Aid and were swayed by pretty words and a nice speech, but knew very little about Obama's actual policies.
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In what is becoming an all-too common script for Clinton surrogates, Governor Ed Rendell thinks that young voters are suckers, duped by drinking too much of the Obama Kool-Aid:

I'll let some young voters rebut these allegations for themselves:

Updated to more specifically define "non-college" youth.

After a six-week lull, voting in the Democratic Primary picks up again tomorrow, this time in Pennsylvania, where the Obama campaign is looking for a win (or something close to a tie) in order to slam the door on the candidacy of Sen. Clinton, the success of which is looking more and more unlikely with each passing contest and Super Delegate endorsement.

As in all previous states, youth turnout tomorrow will surely rise well above levels from 2000 or 2004. With such high stakes on the line, it may even double or triple. I would love to be able to say that such increased turnout among young voters will be the key to an Obama win, but the deck seems stacked against such a possibility.

On paper, the math would seem to be good. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) (pdf), young voters (18 - 29) make up 21% of the eligible electorate in Pennsylvania, or just under 2 million voters. That's about average. Pennsylvania is a big college state, though, and 23% of those young voters are college students, a group which votes in high numbers for Sen. Obama. According to a CBS Newswire poll, PA students support Sen. Obama over Sen. Clinton 71 - 29%.

In the demographically similar state of Ohio, Obama lost to Clinton 54 - 44%. In that contest, young people made up 16% of the Democratic Electorate. Obama will need young voters to make up a much greater share of the electorate tomorrow if he is to overcome Clinton, who has typically held the lead in polling results.

But here's the rub. This campaign was supposed to be over on Super Tuesday. No one thought the two Democratic candidates would still be duking it out in March, let alone April. This has consequences.

As Ben Adler reported in the Politico, the Obama campaign didn't begin voter registration efforts on campuses until late February, and once they did, those efforts ran smack into one of the hazards of student organizing: spring break. During the final weeks of voter registration, most students were away on a beach or at home with their family. Mix in the fact that many students, thinking the contest would never get this far, decided to vote absentee in their home states, and you have a recipe for lower than average student turnout in a state with a higher than average student population.

There is one factor that could change this equation, and that is an increase in turnout from "non-college" youth, or young people with no college experience. As reported by CIRCLE earlier this year, non-college youth, despite comprising a slightly higher percentage of the eligible youth vote, are turning out in far lower numbers than their college-attending and college-educated peers. On Super Tuesday, non-college youth comprised a rather dismal 21% of all young voters (pdf). This, despite the fact that non-college youth make up slightly more than half of the youth population nationwide.

Both the Clinton and Obama campaigns recognize this, and are reaching out to non-college youth, but the work is much harder than engaging students. Non-college youth are not clumped together geographically around a campus, and are thus harder to target. Because many of these "other" young voters are working jobs, in the military, or struggling to start families, they also tend to have very different policy concerns than their college-educated peers, making it a challenge for the campaigns to speak to and engage them.

If Obama can narrow the gap slightly among other constituencies (like white working class men), then a big bump in turnout among these non-college youth could turn the youth vote into a decisive factor in tomorrow's election. This is a long shot, but not outside the realm of possibility as non-college youth have received special attention in Pennsylvania not only from the campaigns but from outside organizations as well.

In the last year - and in particular the last six weeks - Russell Simmon's nonprofit, the Hip Hop Summit Action Network - has been on the ground targeting under-served communities and communities of color, to educate, register, and get young people out to vote. Working in partnership with PowerPAC and the NAACP, the group claims to have registered 120,000 young Pennsylvanians since January.

Tomorrow will be the test of the effectiveness of those efforts. If non-college youth turnout in greater numbers than they have in previous contests, then Obama just might pull this off, or at least keep it close enough to deny Clinton the momentum she needs to continue. If not, we're headed to North Carolina, Indiana, and maybe all the way to the convention.

I've just arrived down in DC for the Roosevelt Institution's conference, Towards a New New Deal: FDR's Liberalism and the Future of American Democracy. It's an interesting crowd. Probably 40% of the crowd are young people involved with Roosevelt - aspiring policy makers. The other 60% seem to be older folks, many of whom probably are policy makers (in the sense that they work at policy oriented institutions). This strikes me as a good thing. In the best case scenario, it means that the Roosevelt Institution isn't ghettoized at a "kids's table" that lacks any connection to the real progressive policy world. We'll see if that observation bears out throughout the day.

We're on a ten minute break now before the first panel. Once things get going I'll pop in every couple of hours with my thoughts on how it is going. In the meantime, mtvU's Editorial Board held it's session with Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday. I still haven't had time to watch the clips, but I put them here without comment for your own information/enjoyment.

I know the clips look the same, but they are all different. If you're more for text than video, Ben Adler has the rundown on the forum at the Politico.

Here's a video of yesterday's march in Prairie View Texas in support of student voting rights. Warning, the sound is a bit loud:

I've been remiss in posting about this. As reported at the Houston Chronicle and Burnt Orange Report, earlier today, over 2,000 students from Prairie View A&M marched 7 miles from campus to the county courthouse to both cast an early ballot in the Texas primary and protest student disenfranchisement in Waller county.

The story is this - in January the county made a decision to radically reduce the number of early polling locations in the county to one. This was not a surprise. The county has a long history of voter suppression of students and people of color. This is from an email I received earlier:

• Supreme Court case that ruled against the county in 1979 where students at PVAMU were forced to take a questionnaire about personal questions in order to vote in Waller.
• In 1993 19 students were indited (charges were later dropped) for voter fraud as they lead massive voters registrations efforts on the campus of PVAMU.
• In 2004 the District Attorney told the students that they would be fined or could face jail time if they registered to vote in Waller County. The Attorney General of Texas intervened and the students were able to register.
• In 2006 Black Youth Vote!, The PVAMU student government association and a local county judge lead a registration effort to register hundreds of students on the campus and none of those students were on the rolls to vote for the mid-term elections. Apparently there was a "scandal" in the elections office and the matter was under investigation by the same office (district attorney's office) that told the students that they could not vote two years earlier.
• During the summer of 2007 Judge Dewayne Charleston had pledged to walk from PV to Austin in protest of the non-response from the Office of the Attorney General. This lead to roughly 300 students names (from the stack that was never put on the rolls in 2006) to be placed on the voting rolls in Waller county.
• Now (2008), the County is proposing to close all the early voting locations in the city of Prairie View with the university alone having over 8000 students and PVAMU being the largest employer in the county.
• The new proposal llocations for 3 days (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) are still inadequate because students are not in town on weekends and it seems like a band aid to a SERIOUS problem with CONSISTENT student voter disenfranchisement in Waller and there has to be an outside intervention to protect the integrity of the elections for the students.

The response has been building for a while. The Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law took up the case on behalf of the students, the Obama campaign also supported the students - writing the Department of Justice on their behalf, registering about 3,000 young voters in the area, and providing water for the march.

The county gave in somewhat once the students announced today's march, though many were unsatisfied with their response. The county agreed to open three extra - and temporary - early voting locations over the weekend, but many students are away from school from Friday through Sunday, making this a less than adequate response on their part.

From a letter written by LCCR to the Department of Justice:

Waller County proposes temporary early polling sites in three locations within the county (Hockley, Pairie View, and Brookshire) for a two-day period, February 22 - 23, 2008. With regard to Prairie View, this two-day period would provide the students at Prairie View A & M University with a diminished opportunity to vote. Rather than conduct voting at the temporary voting site in Prairie View during the week, as has been done in the past, the County has proposed voting there on Friday and Saturday, two days when we have been told by members of the community that the students generally leave campus. The fact that this change was proposed without the input of the minority community in Prairie View combined with the history of voting discrimination within the county, gives the impression that the County is willfully trying to minimize, to the extent possible, the opportunity for the Prairie View students to vote; an action taht would be in line with past attempts to deter students from voting.

Bottom line - the students won some concessions, and today's turnout was impressive, but voter suppression is still happening. The Texas primary is on Tuesday March 4th. Early voting in the state began today.