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Posts tagged ‘Supreme court’

Should You Vote in Your Home State or Your College’s State?

Vote pin on an American flagI was an out-of-state student. For four years, my family and mailing address were in Virginia, but I spent the majority of the year up in Massachusetts. I kept my voting registration in Virginia, mostly because I’d rather cast a vote in a swing state than in one that tends to lean blue.

Many students might not realize it, but it’s a choice all out-of-state students can make. Confirmed by the 1979 Supreme Court case Symm vs. United States, students are permitted to register as voters in either their home state or the state where they attend school. This applies at the local level too. (The Supreme Court case actually dealt with a dispute over voting in a particular county.)

A website called Countmore.org is designed to help students with the decision by comparing the number of electoral college votes, the breakdown of votes in the last election, the number of issues and candidates on the ticket, and the registration deadline to determine which state is “worth more” in the election.

One the one hand, it’s kind of sad that the value of a vote can measured by a simple online algorithm. It’s kind of sad that we can say, and prove, that one vote counts “more” than another. On the other hand, it’s the way our society is structured and I applaud the site for keeping potential voters informed.

 

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Supreme Court Reviewing Affirmative Action

The Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case that could potentially change the way our country handles affirmative action.

Here’s the bare-bones facts of the case. Abigail Fisher, a student whose application to the University of Texas was rejected, sued the school for discrimination. She’s white, and arguing that if she had been a racial minority, she would’ve been accepted.

This isn’t the first time a case dealing with affirmative action has appeared in the court. 1978′s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke declared that a quota system, that is, saying that a certain number of spots are reserved for people of a certain race, is unconstitutional. 2003′s Grutter v. Bollinger, regarding the admissions policy at the University of Michigan, upheld affirmative action by arguing that a school has an interest in diversifying their student body, and should be permitted to consider race as a contributing factor in admissions.

Like most Supreme Court cases, Ms. Fisher’s experience will ultimately not have much to do with the debate. That’s doubly true in this case, since she’s already graduated from a different university. Her circumstances aren’t particularly complicated; she just attended Louisiana State University instead of Texas.

Instead, the case could become an argument over how we can decide when we’ve had “enough” affirmative action. At least, that seems to be the direction the justices were steering the conversation. In other words, at what point will the country decide that schools and other institutions are “diverse enough” and let the policy be race-blind?

That may be a loaded question, but it’s hard to talk about affirmative action without using loaded questions.

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