Q&A of the Day – Florida voter fraud & duplicate voters on college campuses– Part 1
Each day I’ll feature a listener question that’s been submitted by one of these methods.
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Today’s entry...
How many students have 2 voter registrations? They can vote on campus and use the University address as their home address if they attend. Plus keep their parents'home address where they live. How can the board of elections check this out?
Bottom Line: On back of my voter fraud in Palm Beach County story, which illustrated the extensive voter fraud perpetrated in the 2016 and 2018 elections, and fresh off of talking with the Public Interest Legal Foundation who said they’re currently auditing voter rolls in Broward, Miami-Dade and Hillsborough counties for similar irregularities - comes this question. It’s a good one. With record numbers of colleges holding voter registration drives on campus, and some states allowing college addresses to be used as permanent addresses for voting purposes...you can see the opportunity for fraud to occur. So, let’s dig in.
The proliferation of voter registration drives on college campuses and voter drives aimed at young adults are working. A recent study by Tufts University showed that voter participation by college students more than doubled from 2014 to 2018. In 2014 19% of college students voted. That number hit 40% last year. That’s based on studying records of more than 10 million students across more than 1,000 colleges. Now, about the potential for voter fraud.
The first thing to know about college students voting,is that it’s completely legal for students to vote from their college housing address – even if they are attending school from out of state. This was determined in a 1979 Supreme Court ruling Symm v. United States. Therefore, if college students aren’t voting in both their home state and from the location of their student housing, it’s legal.
In recent years the only prosecuted case of voter fraud by a college student occurred in Virginia. A James Madison student illegally created 18 voter forms using information of deceased individuals to cast additional votes in the 2016 election. Of course, what’s prosecuted vs what’s happening can be two different things. The question of multiple voter registrations by college students is part of a bigger conversation of duplicated voter registrations. It’s why it’s important that earlier this year Governor DeSantis announced Florida was joining the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). ERIC cross-references voter registration information across all participating states helping to ensure voters aren’t registered in multiple states and aiding in the cleaning of voter rolls with deceased voters.Florida is the 29th state to participate in the program.I’ll breakout how many college students are estimated to be duplicate voters along with the bigger picture in the second part of today’s Q&A.