The fantastical imaginings of the Triad Conservative

GREENSBORO, NC -- If one has an interest in influencing local elections, as Conservatives for Guilford County's Dr. Joe Guarino does, it helps to know the electorate. That's best done by leaving behind ideological assumptions and getting in touch with, well, the facts.

In arguing against allowing college students to vote where they reside, Dr. Guarino writes on his blog Triad Conservative:

"Here in Greensboro, for instance, students attending local colleges and universities can be extremely disruptive of local elections because they can skew the results against the interests of taxpayers."

Not just "disruptive," Guarino says, but "extremely disruptive;" and by disruptive, one assumes that means that, but for those meddling kids, local elections would have different results.

As is frequently Guarino's pitfall though, he has substituted some phobic assumption for an examination of the facts. Using a voter intelligence web application I'm developing, I took a look at the participation of college-aged voters in the last local election (2011 general).

Here are the facts to which Guarino attributes extreme disruption:

36,387 voters total voted in Greensboro's 2011 municipal election.
135 ( 0.37%) voted on-campus at NCA&T
36 (0.09%) voted on-campus at UNCG

What about off-campus students? That's a little harder to pin down, exactly, but let's use as a proxy voters 18 to 22 years old. Some college students will be older, but not all people 18 to 22 are college students either. How many 18 to 22 year-olds voted in the last local election?

598 (1.6%) voters city-wide ages 18 to 22.

In fact, only one age group voted less than 18 to 22 year-olds in the last local election, those 93 years-old and up.

The interest and passion Conservatives for Guilford County have for local elections is admirable. Representatives like Guarino would better serve the group by engaging the facts rather than attacking a group of people without reason.