Obama Election Watch

The United States Student Association has filed a lawsuit in federal court aiming to overturn two procedures used in Michigan ostensibly aimed at preventing voter fraud. Michigan now cancels the voter registration of any person who is found to have obtained, or renewed, a driver’s license in other states. The obvious target of this rule are college students at universities in Michigan whose parents live out of state. The vast majority of these out-of-state students retain driver’s licenses from their home state. But many students have chosen to register to vote where they attend college.

Courts have ruled that college students have the right to vote in states where they attend college.

Also Michigan automatically removes voters when mail sent to an address on a voter identification card is returned as undeliverable. This procedure strips the voter registrations from many low-income people, a group who tends to move quite often. Voters assume that they are registered to vote, only to find out when they go to the polls on Election Day that their names have been purged from the voting rolls.

These procedures that remove voters from the registration roles have been part of election law in Michigan since 1975. The administration of Governor Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, must enforce the law even though it has a negative effect on Obama’s prospects for winning the state’s 17 electoral votes.

There are less than two weeks to go before the registration deadline in Michigan. It’s too late for the Obama campaign to look to the courts to overturn Michigan’s registration procedures. Instead the Obama forces need to mount a major effort on college campuses and in low-income areas of Detroit and other Michigan cities to inform potential voters that they may have had their registration canceled if they have moved recently or have renewed an out-of-state driver’s license. In this case they need to re-register to vote.

Hundreds of thousands of votes are at stake. College students and low-income voters will tend to be Obama voters. There are more than 600,000 college students in Michigan, many of whom are from out of state. With polls in Michigan showing a very tight race, it is critical that Obama make sure all his potential voters — particularly college students — hold valid registrations before the October 4 state deadline.

There is not much time left.