RV Residents Purged from Voter Rolls in Tennessee
It's an American tradition — hitting the open road, seeing the country, no ties to hold you back. I had always imagined doing it in something like a Volkswagen Beetle after college. These days, it's popular for Americans to take off in their RVs after they retire.
But in Tennessee, as Audie Cornish explained on Day to Day, there's a price for wanderlust — you can lose the right to vote. The Tennessee legislature recently passed amendments to state voting laws requiring voters to have a residential address. So officials in Bradley County told 286 people who live in their RVs full-time that they are being removed from the voter rolls. All list their addresses through a mail-forwarding service, Mail Call USA. Tennessee does not allow people to list commercial businesses as their official residences unless they actually live there.
But the RVers are fighting back with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. They're suing the Tennessee government to put them back on the rolls, saying that they shouldn't be penalized for their lifestyle. Tennessee has no official requirement for the amount of time needed to establish residency — if it did, they say they would have complied.
But Tennessee officials aren't impressed with those arguments. "You can't establish residency by wanting to live somewhere ... it means actually physically moving here," said Brook Thompson, the state's coordinator of elections.
Interesting problem, especially as more Americans look at adopting this kind of lifestyle as they get older. What do you think? Should people without residential addresses be allowed to vote, or is there too high a risk of someone manipulating an election by having lots of RVers "move" into their state?
2:03 PM ET | 11-28-2007 | permalink
