Voting rights advocates and students say the bills would discriminate against college students who feel more connected to the state where they attend college than their hometown. (Photo by Will Steinfeld/New Hampshire Bulletin)
For Dartmouth College sophomore Will Nelson, New Hampshire’s tradition of political involvement was not just a perk of attending school here – it was a major motivator to do so.
Nelson, who grew up in North Dakota, knew about New Hampshire’s star-studded presidential primary and its tradition of close voter scrutiny. But he was also interested in its local politics, from zoning codes to legislative races.
“I really appreciate the town meeting tradition because we don’t have that in the Midwest,” Nelson, a government and history major, said in an interview Tuesday.
In his “why Dartmouth” admission essay, Nelson praised that culture, pledging to help organize local candidate forums if admitted. As a freshman student in spring 2024, he did that, joining an organization called Dartmouth Civics to help co-host debates. One topic of interest to Nelson and other Dartmouth students: changing the town of Hanover’s zoning code to allow taller buildings and fewer parking requirements to help expand student housing options.
“I’ve not missed an election in Hanover since I’ve been there,” said Nelson, who has retained his North Dakota driver’s license and does not own a car here. “I voted in the state primary, select board, school board, presidential primary, and the whole gamut last year.”
Nelson and other out-of-state college students were at the center of a legislative debate Tuesday, as House and Senate committees took up two bills that would bar college students from voting with student ID cards, and require them to show a New Hampshire driver’s license or state ID.
Sen. Victoria Sullivan, a Manchester Republican and the sponsor of one of those bills, says the motivation is simple.
“I bring this bill forward because my constituents have been very clear that they do not want out-of-state residents who temporarily live on our college campuses voting in our elections,” she said in testimony.
Students in New Hampshire should vote in their parents’ state via an absentee ballot because that is their home, Sullivan argued, not where their dormitory is. And those who want to claim New Hampshire as their home should demonstrate that desire by getting a driver’s license or state ID card, she said.
“My son lives in Manchester with our family,” Sullivan said. “He attends school in Boston. He stays on campus throughout the year, with the exceptions of Christmas and spring break. He comes home for summer. He voted in New Hampshire by an absentee ballot in the last election. It took less time to vote absentee than it would have taken him to stand in line to vote on Election Day.”
But voting rights advocates and students say the bills would discriminate against college students who feel more connected to the state where they attend college than their hometown. Making it harder to vote would disrespect those students’ intent, they argued.
Sullivan’s bill, Senate Bill 223, would remove college ID cards from the list of “valid student identification” that currently can be used to obtain a ballot. That would leave only public and private high school student ID cards as valid forms of student ID at the polls.
SB 223 would also allow any New Hampshire student who registers to vote to qualify for in-state tuition in the next academic year, which would override the current requirement that a person must have lived in New Hampshire for 12 uninterrupted months without attending college during that time to qualify for in-state tuition.
The University System of New Hampshire has objected to the bill, arguing that it would drive students to register to vote to obtain the lower in-state tuition, and calculating that it could cost the public universities up to $141.6 million in tuition. “Out-of-state tuition revenue would decrease to unsustainable levels,” USNH wrote in a fiscal note attached to the bill.
In the House, lawmakers are considering House Bill 323, which would bar student identification of all types – including high school identification – from being used to obtain ballots and also block out-of-state driver’s licenses. That bill would include an exception for voters who have been on the voter registration checklist for fewer than 63 days.
House Bill 289 would also bar a person from claiming domicile here if they are a “legal dependent of a person who does not live in New Hampshire.”
In the Senate Election Law and Municipal Affairs Committee Tuesday, some Republican senators appeared supportive of Sullivan’s bill.
“Do you think it’s right that a student who has a residence in another state, driver’s license in another state, and may receive financial aid from that other state, but votes in New Hampshire impact all elections?” said Sen. Tim Lang, a Sanbornton Republican, in a question to one person testifying.
But the bill also drew opposition. Rachel Deane, the Durham town clerk and tax collector and a representative of the New Hampshire City and Town Clerks Association, argued SB 233 does not actually change the law allowing college students to vote – which would require a change in the definition of domicile – but merely eliminates a method for those students to vote. That could mean that students who are otherwise eligible to vote cannot because they don’t have driver’s licenses or state identification, Deane said.
Deane added that the process for obtaining a student identification card and using it to vote is robust and secure, and said the ID cards have expiration dates, photos, and barcodes that can’t be easily replicated.
“Let’s remember who are the students,” she said. “They’re first-time voters. Some of them don’t have the driver’s licenses. Some of them don’t have access to do that. So we’re targeting a specific class of people. That makes me really uncomfortable as an elected official that helps register people to vote.”
Olivia Zink, executive director of Open Democracy, said whether a student identifies more with their parents’ hometown than with their college town is a personal choice that should be made on a case-by-case basis. “I do think that our law does give students the choice, and students have to recognize that they do have the choice to register,” she said.
She raised a hypothetical of a student whose parents lived in Massachusetts but moved to Texas while that student was attending school in New Hampshire.
“That student no longer feels connected to Massachusetts,” Zink said. “… They don’t feel connected because their family moved away. They feel like their home is now in Durham.”
Sen. James Gray, the chairman of the Election Law and Municipal Affairs Committee, appeared skeptical of the bill. Questioning Sullivan, Gray noted that New Hampshire law allows a person to move to the state right before an election and vote there without being questioned as to whether and how long they intend to stay, and he asked how that differed from a college student.
“The difference is intent,” Sullivan said. “If you’re moving here and you intend to live here and make this your home, your intention is to stay and make this your home.”
“The word intent is important,” Gray responded, “because I do not have the ability to look into your head or anybody else’s head and know what your intent is, but at what point in their life do we take them at their word?”
For his part, Nelson does not know how long he will stay in New Hampshire. Because he hopes to attend graduate school, he’s likely going to look at programs out of state, he said. That would mean he might not be in New Hampshire for the 2028 presidential primary, he noted.
But he said for now, New Hampshire is home, and its state and local politics affect him. Nelson intends to remain active in local and national politics, something the organization he joined, Dartmouth Civics, encourages.
“In a presidential campaign, a lot of people divert their attention to who’s running for president, who’s running for Congress,” he said. “And we just want students to know that people who can change their lives the most are the people who are closest to them that they know the least about.”