Lawmaker would ban students from listing dormitories on voter registration

Just because you go to college in Flagstaff or Tempe or Tucson does not mean you should get to vote there, one legislator argues.

State Rep. Bob Thorpe, R-Flagstaff, has proposed a new law to prohibit students from listing college dormitories as addresses when registering to vote.

The lawmaker contends students should register where they live when not attending school, such as at their parents' home. But critics argue the measure would suppress election turnout among students, and it effectively could shove hundreds or thousands of voters out of Thorpe's own district, where he won reelection by fewer than 600 votes.

About 1,800 voters in Thorpe's district listed Northern Arizona University dormitories as their addresses after the last presidential election.

The Arizona Republic analyzed voter registration records and found that the proposed legislation would affect thousands of students in Tempe and Tucson, too, while affecting far more Democratic voters than Republicans.

Many students already are likely registered to vote in their hometowns, and many are not registered at all. Others, such as students from abroad or immigrants who are not citizens, are ineligible.

The Republic’s analysis still turned up more than 2,300 voters with addresses at dormitories owned and operated by Arizona State University in Tempe and downtown Phoenix.

Independents made up sizable minorities of the voters at every dorm.

But at both schools, there were more than twice as many voters registered as Democrats than Republicans.

At ASU dorms, Democrats accounted for 47% of voters, while 20% are Republicans. At the University of Arizona, the divide was even starker, with 51% of voters registered as Democrats and 17% registered as Republicans.

"It's a way to keep young people from voting because some people don't like the way young people vote," Alex Gulotta, state director for the advocacy group All Voting Is Local, said of Thorpe's bill.

Even a few hundred people could make all the difference in Flagstaff.

The city falls in Legislative District 6, which has become a battleground for Republicans. It encompasses an area from Williams to Snowflake. Flagstaff is a decidedly liberal bastion in the district. The district is still a target for Democrats, who see winning District 6 as part of a strategy to gaining a majority in the state House of Representatives for the first time in decades.

Thorpe said the legislation, House Bill 2461, is not meant to save his district from flipping Democratic. The lawmaker is not running for reelection, instead campaigning for a seat on the Coconino County Board of Supervisors.

The lawmaker instead described the matter as local, with business owners frustrated by a sort of town-and-gown divide.

Voters in the city voted in 2016, for example, to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour — higher than the state's $12-an-hour minimum wage.

Students "tend to vote locally, and they only live there six to seven months of the year," Thorpe added.

"Local businesses feel like their votes are really being canceled out," he said.

Thorpe argued students should vote by mail based on wherever they live the rest of the year.

Thorpe's bill would not only apply to dormitory addresses, which he has described as his main concern.

The bill would also prohibit voters from registering using any address where they do not intend to reside 12 months of the year.

That potentially would affect winter visitors to Arizona as well as workers who labor at seasonal jobs in different cities or states.

Thorpe said the law is about where a person intends to reside — that winter visitors simply would have to make a choice of whether they wish to consider themselves Arizona residents or residents of other states.

Patty Hansen, the Coconino County recorder, countered that college students tend not to vote in city elections in large numbers, suggesting that their role in local politics may be overblown.

Other critics argue that students not only live at school but work and shop in the surrounding community. In turn, they argue that students have every right to vote based on where they live at school.

"The majority of their lives is on campus. Their inability to register to vote there would be a problem," said Montserrat Arredondo, table director for One Arizona, an advocacy group that has made a mission out of registering new voters.

Critics also argue, coming in an election year with control of the Legislature at stake, the measure only will confuse voters months before polls open and undercut turnout by students.

No other state has a similar law in place because it would be unconstitutional, said Michael Burns, of the Campus Vote Project, which promotes voter registration on college campuses.

Burns points to Symms vs. United States. In that case, a county clerk in Texas would not allow students at a historically black college to register to vote on the grounds that they did not live full-time in the county. A district judge stopped the county clerk's practice — a decision summarily upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The fate of Thorpe’s bill remains unclear. He filed a similar bill in 2017, but it never got a vote on the House floor.

Contact Andrew Oxford at andrew.oxford@arizonarepublic.com or on Twitter at @andrewboxford.