This past Tuesday, Student Assembly passed a resolution against New Hampshire House Bill 1566. HB 1566, as The Dartmouth recently reported ("N.H. passes voting bill affecting undergraduates," May 5), changes voting and motor vehicle registration requirements to make it nearly impossible for the vast majority of Dartmouth students to vote in New Hampshire. In addition to the resolution, Student Assembly allocated funds to send the legislation to all of New Hampshire's 424 State Representatives and Senators. And if this weren't enough, Student Body President Noah Riner is meeting next week with New Hampshire Governor John Lynch to convey the concerns of Dartmouth's student body, face-to-face, with the state's chief executive.
This is exactly what Student Assembly should be doing. Student Assembly's real power does not lie in its resources, but rather in its ability to effect change by speaking as the sole representative of the entire student body. Lost amid the recent debate over Student Assembly funding is the simple fact that Student Assembly, first and foremost, receives resources to advocate our interests -- not to advance programs that, while tangible, can be completed by other organizations or the College itself. Student Assembly, at least in this instance, should be commended for its performance.
HB 1566, after all, is an overly reactionary measure. And that's not just coming from me -- Rahul Sangwan '07, president of the Dartmouth College Republicans, helped write this article. The bipartisan agreement here on campus against HB 1566 speaks volumes about the bill's inefficacy.
Think about it. We live here the majority of the year for at least four years of our lives; some of us continue living in New Hampshire even after we graduate. We are active residents of the community, and Dartmouth students dedicate more than 40,000 hours of service each year to surrounding areas as volunteers. We are directly affected by the laws of the state legislature, whether it is something absurd like our "possession-by-consumption" alcohol law or something more mundane like local zoning regulations that affect the College. Moreover, in 1979 the United States Supreme Court decided in Symm v. United States that college students have the right to vote where they attend school.
While some have claimed that the law is designed to prevent supposedly widespread voter fraud by college students, a detailed report by the New Hampshire Attorney General last month found only two cases of voter fraud, even after carefully examining the votes of nearly 30,000 New Hampshire voters -- thousands of whom were students at the University of New Hampshire-Durham -- in the 2004 election. Neither case involved a student. Fraud, when it happens, should be addressed -- but that doesn't mean we should throw out the baby with the bathwater.
If that isn't enough, here is an argument that every U.S. citizen, no matter one's political orientation, can buy: we pay taxes here. New Hampshire, unlike almost every other state in the Union, does not have a sales tax and does not tax wages. Instead, the lion's share of tax revenues comes from property taxes. As students, we end up paying these taxes through the fees that we pay to the College, or directly if we are a member of a campus organization with a privately-owned house. Either way, our money goes to the government -- and to not have a voice is nothing more than taxation without representation.
