A group of Nashville students filed a federal lawsuit earlier last week challenging a 2011 Tennessee voter identification law. Nine students from both Fisk University and Tennessee State University ultimately seek to change the law’s exclusion of student IDs as a valid form of voter identification.
Tyler Anselmo, UT junior in political science and active member of the Democratic Party, said he views the law as an attempt by Republicans to exclude younger, traditionally more liberal voters.
For students just becoming eligible to vote, Anselmo sees the law’s exclusion of student ID’s as an unnecessary barrier.
“A lot of students are 18 and they’ll be voting for the first time,” Anselmo said. “It’s very hard if you live, say across the state, to go back home if you want to vote there.”
Anselmo’s concerns may have some founding in statistical data. A study from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that in 2012, the year after Tennessee passed the exclusive law, voter turnout in the state dropped by 2.2 percentage points, or the equivalent to more than 80,000 votes.
Press Secretary for the Tennessee House Republicans Caucus, Cade Cothren, said the argument against the legislature’s voter ID laws “frankly does not make sense.”
Citing the “variety of IDs that exist out there for college campuses,” including private, public, specialty and art schools, Cothren said he sees the law as a way to both prevent voter fraud and make poll worker’s jobs less difficult.
“It shouldn’t really be up to (poll workers) to look at a hundred different varieties of IDs and determine themselves ‘Is this valid or is it not?’” Cothren said, further noting the Republican Party is not interested in disenfranchisement.
“The point of this bill is not to disenfranchise anyone whatsoever,” he said, “and that’s certainly not the goal of any Republican legislator in Nashville to do something like that.”
Between 1964 and 2012, national voter turnout for 18 through 24-year-olds dropped by 12.9 percent, according to the United States Census Bureau.
Contrarily, cases of national voter fraud are relatively infrequent. According to an article by Justin Levitt, professor at Loyola Law School, only 31 credible incidents of voter fraud were recorded out from more than a billion ballots cast for general, special, primary and municipal elections between 2000 and 2014.
To help bring about higher voter turnout in the state, Anselmo encouraged students to call their respective state representatives and voice their concerns.
