It’s depressing to realize, in this age of political extremism and escalating threats to democratic governance, that among the most blithe contributors to this sorry state of affairs are full-timing RVers. Not all full-timers, I hasten to add. Just those who think that their chosen lifestyles as so-called “travelers” should exempt them from fundamental civic obligations while leaving their civic rights intact—even as that attitude further chips away at voter confidence in the integrity of our elections.
I’m talking, of course, about the arrogance reflected in stories such as this one, “South Dakota county moves to restrict voting rights for full-time RVers,” which was published by RVtravel a couple of days ago. Written by Nanci Dixon, reprising her laments of last year about being called for jury duty by a state in which she doesn’t live, the piece continues her tendency to assume nefarious motives where none have been proven and to insist that full-time RVers are being disenfranchised simply because they are rootless—or as she prefers to think of herself, “full-time travelers.”
Let’s start with the latter fiction. Dixon winters in Arizona and spends her summers work-camping, which is to say, for most of each year she’s putting her roots down in one place or another. That’s not to say that she doesn’t travel, but it is to say that the travel is largely incidental to her getting from one semi-permanent campground site to another. Dixon is not a “full-time traveler” as much as she is a full-time RV-dweller, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it should be noted that South Dakota apparently is not one of those semi-permanent dwelling places.
South Dakota is, however, the state Dixon and thousands of other full-timers have claimed as their official domiciles for unabashedly self-serving reasons, chief among them the absence of a state income tax or a personal property tax on vehicles. You, too, can have such perks. All you need is a couple of hundred bucks to rent a mailbox at one of a handful of the state’s mail-forwarding services, spend a night in town to nail down your status as an “official resident,” and just like that you’ll have everything you need to get a South Dakota driver’s license—and until last summer, the voter registration that came with it.
But the problems with that loosey-goosey arrangement, as I detailed a year ago, should be readily apparent, and especially in an age when ensuring voting integrity is all the rage (and I do mean rage). Concerned about the potential for abuse (one fanciful scenario contemplated thousands of liberal Minnesotans driving into the Republican state for a 24-hour stay and the opportunity to sway an election), the South Dakota legislature last year adopted new rules requiring voters to attest they’d actually lived in the state f0r 30 days or more in the year prior to voting.
Such a requirement isn’t unique—Alaska, Illinois and Nevada, among others, have similar residency rules—but it does pose several problems. The most obvious is that while South Dakota has an understandable interest in restricting voting on state and local issues to state and local residents, the residency requirement puts arguably unconstitutional limitations on voting in national elections. A more pragmatic problem is simply one of enforceability: how can election officials determine whether the residency requirement has been met? For that reason alone, a similar law was enacted and then repealed after just a year more than two decades ago.
Yet there’s also little question that South Dakota—and presumably other states that offer mailbox residency, notably Texas and Florida— has a problem. Approximately 60,000 out-of-state vehicles were registered in South Dakota five years ago, and that number undoubtedly has since increased. More than 6,3000 people are registered to vote at the address of mail-forwarding company Americas Mailbox in Box Elder, while as many as 1,400 registered South Dakota voters “live” in the mailboxes of My Home Address in the town of Emery—or roughly three times the town’s actual population. That’s a whole lot of imaginary residents capable of creating very real election havoc.
Now that problem has erupted, following a June 4 primary in which two candidates lost by a small margin—a loss quite possibly affected by election officials, citing the new residency requirement, declining to count 132 ballots that had been cast by people registered with a mailbox address. The ACLU of South Dakota has jumped in, challenging that decision but also demanding that no “improper challenges will be entertained” during the Nov. 5 general election, paving the way for even more election denialism in the months ahead. “South Dakota has been heralded as the freest state in the nation,” the ACLU thundered with questionable assurance in a June 21 press release, “but restricting access to one of the most fundamental rights we have as Americans—participating in our democracy through voting—strips residents of the freedom to take part in our elections.”
Residents? Really?
To be sure, this is a problem of South Dakota’s own making. But it remains a problem because of public pressure from libertarian RVers and screeds like Dixon’s. Contrary to the headline, South Dakota is not moving to restrict the voting rights of full-time RVers, but of people who don’t live in their state while pretending they do. Dixon could always register to vote in Arizona, and perhaps should, since that’s where she spends a big chunk of her time—but that would mean shouldering the civic responsibilities that come with it, such as paying Arizona taxes and serving Arizona jury duty.
Far more lucrative to go venue shopping for states that allow a disconnect between rights and responsibilities, loading up on the former, disregarding the latter and taking offense when asked how it became socially acceptable to be a freeloader.
Renting Dirt 