Dodd's Statement; Student Caucusing as a Voting Rights Issue

Update: Matt Browner-Hamlin from the Dodd campaign emailed me to say that the issue here is the timing of the Daily Iowan story. Dodd's comments reported in the story were made at 1pm yesterday. The campaign issued it's statement at 7pm that night. This is good in that it means the Dodd campaign isn't trying to double-talk the youth vote community on this issue like I feared. However, the statement is still too easy to parse one way or another or me. "Iowa students" could be interpreted a number of ways. I'm still urging that all campaigns and the party come forth with an unequivocal statement that leaves no room for interpretation.
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I thought this story was starting to come to a successful resolution, but apparently people aren't getting it.

Last night, the Dodd campaign released a statement that seemed to affirm the rights of students to participate in the Iowa Caucus. From the Chris Dodd for President blog:

Chris Dodd for President Communications Director Hari Sevugan today released the following statement:

"We welcome the participation of Iowa students in the process."

Jane Fleming Kleeb and Mike Connery have been writing about this issue at Young Voter PAC Blog and Future Majority, respectively. Daily Kos diarist psericks has also written extensively about the student vote in Iowa.

If you're a student, a Millenial voter (like me), or a voter of any other age looking to support Chris Dodd's candidacy, join the Dodd Squad and volunteer for the campaign. We can use your help!

Then this morning, the Daily Iowan ran a story in which Senator Dodd was quoted (just yesterday at a forum at Mount Mercy College no less) as saying that only students "from Iowa" should participate, and Dodd explicitly stated what he meant by that:

Comparing out-of-state students to his staff members, who have lived in Iowa for more than a year, he said the caucuses should be reserved for Iowans, which doesn't include students paying out-of-state tuition.

"If you're from Hartford, Conn., and you're going to school at the University of Iowa, and you're paying out of state tuition, you're [unfairly] casting yourself as an Iowan," he said.

There should be no confusion on this issue. In both the letter of the law and spirit of our democracy, those students can and should be participating in the caucus. And candidates should not be splitting hairs or delivering one message to the youth vote community while conveying a totally different message at Iowa forums. Haven't we all learned that you can't get away with that kind of campaigning anymore?

As blogger Marcy Wheeler noted earlier this week in response to Hillary's initial statements, this is a voting rights issue that's bigger than any one campaign or even any one state:

It pisses me off not because she's dissing my vote (the MI primary/caucus monstrosity, that big contest for delegates that have been taken away, has been pretty much called for Hillary already). It pisses me off because I've run the precinct organization for a county with two large universities (U Michigan and EMU). And I'm well aware of the way that HAVA laws in many states have affected college students' ability to vote.

You see, in MI, you have to jump through flaming hoops to be able to vote absentee in your first election. So what happened in 2004 is that a bunch of MI college students who had first become eligible to vote just before or just after they left home to go to college at UM or EMU were faced with those flaming hoops as they contemplated voting for a Democratic President (remember how well Kerry did with the youth vote??). The best alternative to those flaming hoops we had to offer was massive voter registration drives on campus--basically re-registering the students where they lived so they could vote in person.

Even in 2006, I can remember a father and daughter who came to the polling station I was watching--you could tell she was absolutely thrilled to be able to vote. But she and dad had made two trips back and forth to Detroit, all evening long, to figure out where she could legally vote. Much as she was thrilled to be voting, she was damn near tears at facing the flaming hoops. And for students from further away, like Traverse City, driving back and forth just to be able to vote is not an option.

The American Prospect has an even better run-down on the ways in which residency requirements have been used by Republicans to disenfranchise students in university towns. That's the thing, too. Typically this is a Republican tactic meant to drive down student turnout and maintain their hold on local elected leadership positions. Seeing the Democrats use it against each other in a primary process is sickening. We should be reducing barriers to participation and encouraging all young people to take part in the political process. This whole issue is making me sad to be a Democrat.

All of this makes it doubly important to have the DNC and the Iowa Democratic Party - and all of the Democratic Presidential Campaigns - to come clean on this issue and release unequivocal statements affirming the rights of all Iowa students - regardless of where they lived when they went to high school - to participate in the Iowa Caucuses. This has gone on long enough and anything less just doesn't pass the smell test.