Students at the Philadelphia-area Haverford College have been trying to get a polling site closer to their campus “for years” because the current one is a whopping … one mile distant.
Philly.com reported over the weekend that Haverford students make up the majority of voters in the district, but most don’t have cars and “must travel about a mile and a half, partially on a road without sidewalks” to get the nearest polling place, an elementary school.
Every proposal for a closer location has been rejected by the Delaware County Board of Elections, and the students’ lawyer believes that’s because the “largely Republican county government that is far from eager to make voting easier for a Democratic-leaning college campus.”
“There is no other reason to deny this petition other than that the Republican Party is trying to discourage college students from voting,” Jack Stollsteimer said.
County GOP Chairman Andy Reilly replied that Stollsteimer is “full of hot air.”
“From my end, I know there’s no Republican undue influence,” he said. The report cites parking issues and increased traffic concerns as reasons for the denial.
Though Haverford College is in a congressional district that is seen as a likely pickup for Democrats, students there will also cast ballots in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races in a battleground state.
“Look, Conor Lamb won his special election by 730 votes,” former Gov. Ed Rendell said of the Pennsylvania Democrat’s House race in March. “My guess is in Haverford, they’ve got close to 1,000 potential voters.”
Rendell said he thought that the Pennsylvania secretary of state should look into the Haverford polling place dispute.
With the stakes so high, Democrats are relying on a sea of young voters nationally to take back the U.S. House and win gubernatorial and state legislative seats. …
An informal Inquirer survey of colleges in Pennsylvania and New Jersey found 13 with on-campus polling places. Eleven more have polls within a few blocks, including Bryn Mawr College, where students vote at a nearby church, and Widener University, where they vote at an adjacent elementary school, both in Delaware County.
Ten others reported polls farther away and said they ran shuttles. That includes Villanova University, also in Delaware County, where students have several designated off-campus voting sites. Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania have polls on campus; Temple does not.
In a proposal last year, Haverford offered to provide golf cart shuttle service to the polls … but that was rejected.
Officials at Haverford are hoping a new offer will bear fruit. After all, a walk of a whole mile can be quite “disenfranchising” for college students.
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