Via ThinkProgress:
Student Loan Debt Has Ballooned Since 1990: Many of the faces of Occupy Wall Street and the blog “We Are the 99 Percent” are former students saddled with huge college debt. These individual stories and public protests have made the nation take notice, including President Obama who announced a plan that would lower some debtors’ monthly payments. The following graphic shows how student loan debt has skyrocketed over the last 21 years, topping $1 trillion in unpaid debt:
With so many students - who are known to tend to vote liberal - what's a Republican to do but try to keep them from the polls?
The New York Times reports:
Next fall, thousands of students on college campuses will attempt to register to vote and be turned away. Sorry, they will hear, you have an out-of-state driver’s license. Sorry, your college ID is not valid here. Sorry, we found out that you paid out-of-state tuition, so even though you do have a state driver’s license, you still can’t vote.
Political leaders should be encouraging young adults to participate in civic life, but many Republican state lawmakers are doing everything they can instead to prevent students from voting in the 2012 presidential election. Some have openly acknowledged doing so because students tend to be liberal.
Seven states have already passed strict laws requiring a government-issued ID (like a driver’s license or a passport) to vote, which many students don’t have, and 27 others are considering such measures. Many of those laws have been interpreted as prohibiting out-of-state driver’s licenses from being used for voting.
It’s all part of a widespread Republican effort to restrict the voting rights of demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic. Blacks, Hispanics, the poor and the young, who are more likely to support President Obama, are disproportionately represented in the 21 million people without government IDs. On Friday, the Justice Department, finally taking action against these abuses, blocked the new voter ID law in South Carolina.
Creating an explanation for the new ID laws, as Republicans don't generally want to actually say the purpose is to turn away voters, they've claimed the stricter laws are "to prevent voter fraud." However, this explanation falls flat since there is almost no voter fraud in the nation to prevent.
The stricter voter ID laws aren't just having a negative impact on the rights of students to vote: Think Progress reports that "A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that her old state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations."
"Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate."
