Republicans win in effort to limit student vote ahead of key 2020 races

‘They are kids voting liberal,’ a New Hampshire Republican said in 2011 as legal battle over student voting in the state continues

Sam Levine in New York
Thu 5 Dec 2019 11.00 GMT
Last modified on Thu 5 Dec 2019 11.03 GMT

Maggie Flaherty grew up in a small town in California, but after she moved to New Hampshire to attend Dartmouth College, she registered to vote in the state where she would be spending at least four years.

Now she is embroiled in a fight against Republicans in the state that is being watched across the country.

Flaherty and a fellow student are challenging a Republican-backed law that is making it harder for many out-of-state students and other temporary residents to cast a ballot in a state with outsized national influence.

The lawsuit has been endorsed by the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic presidential hopefuls. But last week, Flaherty and her colleague Caroline Casey hit another obstacle when the US district judge Joseph LaPlante denied a request to block the law just months before the primary elections.

New Hampshire is a small swing state where both local and state-wide races can be decided by razor-thin margins. Donald Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by just 2,736 votes in 2016. The same year, Maggie Hassan, also a Democrat, defeated Kelly Ayotte for a Senate seat by just 1,017 votes. The Democratic primary in February and general election in November are expected to be closely fought.

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