I
feel like I’ve been really testing the adage “it’s better late than
never� on this blog lately. Anyway, I was recently reminded of a group
that I vaguely knew about that did a lot of great work during the 2004
election – the Student Voting Rights Campaign.
With Eugene Kang running in Ann Arbor I’ve been thinking about voting
rights more frequently these days. Go check out their site. Their their listserv archives is in particular a great treasure-trove of student voting information. From their about page:

So
long as students are systematically discouraged or prevented from
engaging in electoral politics in the communities that they call home,
we will have less young people on the voter rolls, we will have less
vibrancy and innovation in our local politics, we will raise more
citizens who become politically apathetic adults, we will retain a
needlessly vast cultural age gap, our government will be less
responsive to the concerns of the young and we will have a weaker
democracy than we deserve.

One of the founders of
the organization, Ellen Kolasky, wrote a report for the League of
Conservation Voters Education Fund last summer that I blogged about in September
on the suppression of student voting rights. When I went to find a copy
of the report online it was nowhere to be seen, but I tracked down an
electronic copy from LCVEF:

> “Not Home, Not Welcome: Barriers To Student Voters� (PDF)

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