Fright Is the Mother of Invention

 

“When you vote, it scares some folks.”

--Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking to students at NC A&T, Sept. 16, 2023

Rep. Zenger

Here's one now, so frightened he makes a serious suggestion to take away voting rights from college students in North Carolina -- more specifically, students at AppState -- that would violate the Supreme Court's ruling from 1979, Symm v. United States. College students have the constitutional right to vote where they go to school.

But Rep. Jeff Zenger (Forsyth, Dist. 74) said he got an idea from his daughter, a student at AppState, who complained to him that college students voting in local elections made her feel yucky. "When they vote for Senate and vote for President, that’s great," Zenger said his daughter said. "But what isn’t fair is that they vote in the local elections. The problem is that the college students don’t understand the issues of the local politics and the local people."

"Don't understand the issues"? Is there a test for that? Doesn't understand the issues worse than, say, local high school graduates who did not go away to college and who don't know the three branches of government? There are uninformed people everywhere, and all of them have the right to vote in local elections. So far.

So Rep. Zenger, who likes ideas that cripple the student vote, proposes putting it into North Carolina law that any college student claimed as a dependent by parents must vote where those parents live. Heaping on the heads of college students (who are already not supposed to know their asses from a handsaw) new hurdles and confusion that come with voting by mail -- already made more difficult by Zenger's pals in the General Assembly. Yeah, that's the ticket!