[EL] Where can college students vote this November?

[Charles H Stewart]

This question has come to me, and seems to present an interesting twist that requires an answer from a legal scholar, not a political scientist...

Let us say that in the upcoming fall semester, a university says that their students have to stay "at home" and cannot live on campus.  The student in question lives out of state.  The student in question would otherwise have qualified to vote in the state where they were a student.  Can that student vote absentee in the locality where they are enrolled in college?

This seems to be a major twist on the question of where students are domiciled for the purposes of elections when they are away from home to go to college.

I will note that MIT students received an e-mail from the administration saying that for the purposes of the Census, they will be counted as living at MIT, even though the campus had evacuated. I know that this has little-to-no bearing on the question about domicile for voting, but it is an example of how one legal fiction has ignored campus evacuations.

Thoughts?

Charles

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Charles Stewart III
Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science
Director, MIT Election Data and Science Lab
Co-Director, Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project

Department of Political Science
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts   02139
617-253-3127
cstewart at mit.edu

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