Maine: GOP Official Tries to Suppress Student Voters—Despite No Evidence of Fraud | Campus Progress

Maine college students are under attack by the chairman of the state’s Republican Party who recently “brandished a list of more than 200 college students he said likely engaged in voter fraud.”

The problem? There’s no evidence that any of the 206 young people who voted in recent elections did anything wrong.

Republican Party chair Charlie Webster is attempting to challenge students’ right to register and vote where they attend school, indicating some had registered in their home state and then re-registered on campus, according to a report this week from the Bangor Daily News.

Wisconsin: The Next Step in Wisconsin’s Disenfranchisement Agenda | Campus Progress

If there has been any doubt regarding the intent behind this year’s upsurge in voter ID legislation, Governor Scott Walker’s latest move leaves little room to question the conservative disenfranchisement agenda, at least in the state of Wisconsin. In what seems like a blatant attempt to lessen the accessibility of photo identification, Governor Walker’s administration has announced the closure of sixteen DMV centers throughout the state – for “economic” purposes.

“What the heck is going on here? Is politics at play here?” asked Rep. Andy Jorgenson (D-Fort Atkinson). The Department of Transportation plans to close the DMV center in Jorgenson’s county of Fort Atkinson, with the next nearest station more than thirty minutes away by car.

An official from the Department of Transportation, however, insists that there is no correlation between the state’s recent passage of legislation requiring photo ID to vote and the planned closing of sixteen centers that provide the required identification.

National: New voter ID legislation sparks debate among younger voters | MiamiHerald.com

A series of laws and proposals popping up across the country this year to strengthen voter identification requirements is part of an effort to discourage voting by students, who turned out in large numbers for Barack Obama in 2008, the head of Rock the Vote told a conference of young liberals on Thursday.

“Under the radar, there are a set of people trying to make it harder for students to vote,” said Rock the Vote president Heather Smith at the Campus Progress National Conference, just one day after Rhode Island announced a new voter identification law requiring photo IDs.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Rhode Island became the seventh state to have new or strengthened voter identification policies signed into law this year; several dozen more are considering or have considered similar proposals.