Manipulating where students vote won't work | Opinion

During college sports games, the same rules apply to all teams to ensure a fair outcome. But when it comes to college students’ voting in local elections, left-wing interest groups seem to think the rules simply shouldn’t apply to them.

Some journalists are disingenuously claiming that Ohio’s new election integrity law will suppress the votes of out-of-state students. But the left is far more concerned about manipulating exactly where students turn out to vote than defending their basic right to do so.

Ohio’s new law already provides fair and consistent opportunities for college students to exercise their right to vote through its popular voter ID provisions. Ohio voters are required to show a government-issued photo ID when they show up to the polls, available to all Ohio residents, free of charge.

Ohio aligns with the majority of states that rely on voter ID laws to safeguard the voting system. After recently passing a similar law, Georgia experienced unprecedented voter turnout during its 2022 election, thoroughly rebuking an absurd "voter suppression" narrative promoted by the left, including President Joe Biden himself.

Support for a photo ID requirement to vote has never been higher than it is today. At a time when Americans seem to agree on very little, an astounding 84% of voters believe that everyone should show a photo ID at the polls, including 82% of low-income voters, 72% of Black voters and 90% of Hispanic voters.

Even 66% of Democrats support voter ID.

Under Ohio’s new law, out-of-state college students have two voting methods at their disposal: They can vote by mail in their hometown election or register and vote in their college town. Ohio’s new law makes that easy enough. College students just need to switch their residency and obtain an Ohio driver’s license or a free state ID to show at the polls.

But many out-of-state students understandably don’t want to switch their residency. Some claim out-of-state status for financial aid or other reasons, while others intend to return to their home states after graduation. They can still vote, just not where liberals want them to: on their college campuses.

Why is campus voting so important to the left? Party operatives want to leverage high concentrations of young, likely liberal students to elect Democratic Party candidates. Colleges can pull in tens of thousands of potential votes from other states and communities, enough to swing key local, state and federal races.

That gives cynical political groups an enormous incentive to register college students where they go to school, even if they aren’t actually residents of that community. But by requiring voters to trade in their California, Michigan, or Pennsylvania licenses for an Ohio ID − in other words, to actually become a resident of Ohio − the law makes it a lot harder to win elections on the backs of out-of-state students.

But many are still trying. Some activists are even suggesting that out-of-state students should evade the new law by requesting a mail-in ballot. That would let them keep voting in Ohio, since you only need to include the last four digits a Social Security number to cast a mail ballot. But if a student is going to vote by mail, he can just as easily get a ballot from his home state. That’s the right way to do it, and it has the added perk of avoiding potential allegations of fraud.

It also respects the rights of the residents of college towns to a representative democracy. After all, they bear the burdens of elections long after college students graduate and leave town for job opportunities in other states. They’re the ones who get stuck with higher taxes, deal with the effects of plummeting property values, and more. By targeting Ohio college students for partisan gain, leftist groups attack college town residents’ basic right to self-government. It’s only fair that local elections be determined by local residents.

A differing opinion: Ohio's new voter ID law a waste of our time and money

This latest attack on voter ID is just as stale and misleading as all the others. Ohio’s law won’t stop anyone, college student or otherwise, from voting. In fact, Ohio’s first election under the new voter ID law on May 2 went swimmingly. Left-wing groups are just worried it will make it harder to illegitimately stack the electoral deck.

Everyone benefits − students included − when fair and popular laws such as Ohio’s voter ID law make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

Jason Snead, a native of Beavercreek, Ohio, is executive director of the Honest Elections Project.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Manipulating where students vote won't work | Opinion