MLive: Mike Rogers helped pass “a bill in the Michigan state Senate that made it harder for college students to vote. One of his former staff members and several of his colleagues said that was the point.”

LANSING — New reporting from MLive reveals that Mike Rogers only won his 2000 congressional race by suppressing student voters. As a Michigan state senator, Rogers helped pass legislation that “made it harder for college students to vote.” The law helped drive turnout on Michigan State University’s campus down by 12% and secured his razor-thin 111-vote margin of victory, launching his 14-year career in the U.S. House.

According to “one of [Rogers’] former staff members and several of his colleagues,” suppressing student voters to help Republicans like Rogers “was the point” of the legislation.

William Nowling, who was a member of Rogers’ state Senate staff at the time, told MLive: “A common trope among Republicans at the time is that the Democrats used college towns to drive up votes in key areas. Not that people were voting illegally, but they just made it easier for people to vote here but they’re really from West Bloomfield. […] Mike’s idea on that bill, at least my recollection of it, is that it was intended to kind of curtail that.”

Read more:

MLive: In a tight Senate race, El-Sayed has the youth vote locked up

• Rogers has made campus stops this year, but courting college students is less his thing.

• In fact, in the year he mounted his first run for the U.S. House of Representatives, he did just the opposite, sponsoring a bill in the Michigan state Senate that made it harder for college students to vote.

• One of his former staff members and several of his colleagues in the legislature said that was the point.

• Public Act 118 of 1999 mandated several small bureaucratic changes in the way the Secretary of State’s office would handle changes of address for driver’s licenses.

• It also included one big change: saying for the first time that Michiganders could only register to vote at the address on their driver’s license.

• “A common trope among Republicans at the time is that the Democrats used college towns to drive up votes in key areas,” said William Nowling, who was a member of Rogers’ state Senate staff at the time and now directs the Communication Leadership and Strategy program at Michigan State University. “Not that people were voting illegally, but they just made it easier for people to vote here but they’re really from West Bloomfield.”

• “Mike’s idea on that bill, at least my recollection of it, is that it was intended to kind of curtail that,” he said.

• Rogers said then – and his campaign says now – that the bill was about election security.

• But, in the weeks before the 2000 general election, college students who had previously been able to vote where they went to school without putting a dorm room address on their driver’s license found themselves scrambling to adapt to the new rule.

• Rogers’ Democratic opponent that year, Dianne Byrum, described the weeks before election day as “an absolute meltdown.”

• “The clerk was overwhelmed, and it just disenfranchised hundreds, if not thousands of students,” she said. “…then there were all kinds of challenges at the polling places, and students were being turned away and then set on wild goose chases as to how they could exercise their right to vote.”

• Rogers won the election, in a district that included MSU, by 111 votes, launching his 14-year career in Congress.

• Compared with the 1996 presidential election, turnout in East Lansing was down by more than 12%.

###