Register Students

As a result of the passage of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, students across the country are now eligible to vote in local, state and national elections. In Massachusetts, state attorney general Robert Quinn ruled in an opinion this summer that student going to school in the state are eligible to register to vote if they can prove six months residence. Following his announcement, every town in Massachusetts began enrolling students as voters--every town but Cambridge.

From the very beginning of the 18-year old vote, the Cambridge Election Commission has obstinately refused to recognize the intent of Quinn's ruling, registering students only with the greatest of difficulty. Cambridge registration procedures have made such obstruction even easier.

Registration here is carried out by individual registrars, and it is the particular registrar who decides whether to register a voter or not. According to Francis J. Burns, a member of and secretary to the Election Commission, if there is any doubt in the mind of the registrar concerning a person's residence, the case must be referred to the Election Commission for a hearing.

If a student is unhappy with the results of the hearing, he can then go to court. Four Cambridge students did so during the summer only to be greeted by further confusion of the issue. The students had been told by the registrars that since they were not self-supporting, they could not qualify as residents. They took their case against the city of Cambridge to the federal district court, where last Monday Magistrate Willy J. Davis handed down a decision that invalidated the registrars' justification for refusing to register the students, but which also refused to force the city of Cambridge to enroll potential student voters.

Davis ruled that Cambridge had a "compelling" need to establish regulations for determining legal residence. In an interview with the Crimson he said that a Massachusetts driver's license, a car registered in the state, or a local bank account were among possible criteria for indicating intent to remain in Cambridge. He said that cancelled rent checks and past telephone bills were suitable for showing residency over the past six months.

Davis concluded, however, that the final decision was up to the individual registrar, and dumped the whole thing back into the lap of the Election Commission.

But the behavior of the Election Commission has been erratic at best and outrageous at worst. Students attempting to register have been confronted with a whole series of arbitrary requirements. The success of an individual's attempt to register depends upon a grab bag of variables--the time of day, length of hair, clothing, smell--and a set of ever-changing semi-legal questions which may or may not be asked by an individual registrar. Conflicting reasons are often given for refusals to register.

The Election Commission's treatment of the Cambridge Committee for Voter Registration (CCVR) has been shoddy. It took CCVR mill-ins (at the end of July and the beginning of September) to get the Commission to open its offices for voter registration during evening hours. Election Commission members have reacted to the CCVR with annoyance rather than appreciation.

One would think that an election commission would be among those most interested in getting more people to register. However, the Cambridge Election Commission has acted, on the whole, as if its role was to discourage people from taking legitimate political action. All in all, the Election Commission has acted only to discredit itself and its ostensible function. The desire of the Commission to see fewer rather than more voters registered makes a mockery of the laws it claims to uphold.

The law--both as passed by Congress and interpreted by the courts--is clear. Students have the right to register in their college community. October 13 is the deadline for voter registration in Cambridge, and the Election Commission, if it is to do its job, should immediately begin processing students interested in becoming voters.