New Hampshire Republicans Are Close to Passing Their Trump-Inspired Poll Tax.

'On Wednesday, the New Hampshire Senate passed a controversial measure known as HB 372 along party lines, with 14 Republicans in favor and nine Democrats opposed. HB 372 is essentially a poll tax on students who moved to New Hampshire for college, requiring many of them to pay hundreds of dollars in order to cast a ballot. The bill will almost certainly pass the GOP-controlled House in the coming weeks. Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, opposes HB 372, but has not yet revealed whether he plans to veto it.

New Hampshire Republicans have long sought to restrict college students’ ability to vote in the state. In the early 1970s, the state denied the ballot to college students who planned to move away after graduation. A federal court ruled that university students have a constitutional right to vote where they live, but Republican town clerks continued to block students’ access to the ballot for decades. In 2012, the GOP-controlled Legislature passed a law that falsely told residents that they could not register to vote unless they planned to remain indefinitely. The New Hampshire Supreme Court unanimously invalidated the measure as a violation of the state constitution.

Following the 2016 election, in which Hillary Clinton and Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan won New Hampshire by slim margins, Republicans renewed their focus on the state’s voting laws. Donald Trump claimed that voters from Massachusetts flooded the state to deny him a victory, a baseless allegation endorsed by GOP state legislators. The head of Trump’s voter fraud commission, Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has also incorrectly asserted that thousands of fraudulent votes tipped the state toward Clinton. (Indeed, despite widespread claims of border-hopping, there is simply no evidence that any out-of-state voter has ever illegally cast a ballot in New Hampshire.)

Republican legislators responded to this frenzy in June by passing a voter intimidation law that adds documentation requirements for new voters and subjects them to arrest and imprisonment if they lack the required forms. A state judge has blocked most of the law, which was apparently designed to scare college students out of voting for fear of arrest. While Sununu’s administration defends that measure in court, GOP lawmakers are attempting to push through HB 372.'>>>

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/new-hampshire-senate-passes-poll-tax-to-suppress-student-voting.html