'Fox News: We Report, So You'll Decide to Vote Elsewhere,' Students Misled about Voting Rights

NEW YORK - September 22 - In a bizarre twist on Fox's election-year slogan, "We report, you decide," a local Fox affiliate, Fox 11 News in Tucson, is broadcasting reports aimed at scaring off University of Arizona students from voting on campus. A coalition of advocates wrote today to the managing editor at Fox 11 News in Tucson calling upon the station "to issue an on-air clarification of the rights of out-of-state and in-state University of Arizona students to register and vote in Pima County."

The groups demanding that Fox stop its scare tactics include Rock the Vote, the Feminist Majority Foundation, and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

The broadcasts in question aired on Aug. 31 and Sept. 8. In the Aug. 31 broadcast, Fox reporter Natalie Tejeda began her report with, "Several hundred students have registered to vote here over the past few days, but the Pima County registrar of voters believes many may have unintentionally committed a felony."

A few seconds later, Tejeda reported, "What many (students) don't realize is that legally, students from out of state aren't eligible to vote in Arizona because they're considered temporary residents."

In fact, in 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a ruling that college students must be allowed to register in their college communities. (United States vs. Symm, 439 U.S. 1105 (1979).) Arizona law requires that students seeking to vote at college must be U.S. citizens, 18 or older on Election Day, who have lived in the college community for 30 days prior to the election.

Tejeda closed her Aug. 31 report with this ominous warning and the clear recommendation that University of Arizona students not vote on campus: "So how easy is it to get caught? Well, starting this past January all voter applications are crosschecked with the Motor Vehicles Department and social security Administration. If they find that you are falsifying your residency you could be prosecuted. At this time we don't know if anybody has yet been indicted, but Roads (the local election official) says one of the easiest things you can do to avoid all that is simply go on line or pick up the phone and call your home state's elections office and ask for an absentee ballot."

CONTACT: Katherine Spillar of the Feminist Majority Foundation, 310-556-2500, Hans Riemer of Rock the Vote, 202-962-9710, Natalia Kennedy of the Brennan Center for Justice, 212-998-6736

Rock the Vote
http://www.rockthevote.com/

Feminist Majority Foundation
http://www.feminist.org/store/index.asp

Brennan Center for Justice
http://www.brennancenter.org/

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