For months, the Dartmouth College Democrats worked overtime preparing for this month’s New Hampshire presidential primary. The task wasn’t as simple as spreading information about dates and polling places. Instead, the group of about 40 students found itself spreading a more fundamental message: Yes, despite a controversial state law passed in 2018, college students still can vote in New Hampshire.
“Many students that I’ve talked to have been under the impression that if they have an out-of-state driver’s license, they cannot vote in New Hampshire, and that is just absolutely not the case,” said Arianna Khan, a sophomore who led the Dartmouth Democrats’ voter-education efforts.
The law changed the state’s legal definition of a resident, requiring that potential voters establish a “domicile” there, or principle place of residence. It is among a number of voting laws throughout the country, passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures after the 2016 presidential election, that critics say have made it harder for college students to vote.
In that election and the 2018 midterms, voter turnout among college students — often wrongly perceived as overwhelmingly liberal — surged, more than doubling in 2018 compared with the 2014 election.
Students that I’ve talked to have been under the impression that if they have an out-of-state driver’s license, they cannot vote in New Hampshire.
Highly contested statewide races were decided by thin margins in several states during the 2016 and 2018 elections. Heading into a new election cycle with control of the presidency, the U.S. Congress, and statehouses hanging in the balance, the new laws could make a decisive difference.
Voter-ID laws, polling-location restrictions, and misinformation from public officials surrounding who is eligible to vote are all examples of voter suppression, said Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University. Voter-suppression laws often target minority populations who usually vote Democratic, not just college students, even as little if any evidence exists to suggest that voter fraud is a widespread problem.
Amid the new laws, college Democrats such as Khan and other politically active students have worked to get their classmates to the polls regardless. Students spend hours registering their peers to vote, explaining information they need, and even physically driving people to off-campus polling places. In some cases, colleges are also pitching in.
In reality, the New Hampshire law, which is being challenged in court, doesn’t block any age-eligible U.S. citizens living in the state from voting. But a student with a car may be required to get a New Hampshire driver’s license after registering to vote in the state, according to reporting by Boston.com.
Khan characterized the law as a “poll tax,” since paying for a new license and registration can be expensive for college students and challenging since the nearest New Hampshire Division of Motor Vehicles office is nearly 40 minutes away from the Dartmouth campus. And for months the state provided little guidance on how to comply with the law.
“That confusion is in itself voter suppression. If you don’t explain to me what I need to do to vote, then how am I supposed to vote?” Khan said.
Loss of Polling Places in Texas
Getting students to the polls is a tall order for McKenzie McPherson, who is one of the few students at Abilene Christian University, in West Texas, registering classmates to vote.
Last year, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature passed a bill that banned early voting locations that did not remain open through the entire two-week early voting period. That prohibited temporary mobile polling locations that were often set up at a number of college campuses throughout the state for one or two days.
Republican legislators claimed the law, which is being challenged in court, stopped local lawmakers from setting up polling locations at places where they may get favorable votes, such as near the school-administration building during school bond elections. But it triggered wider ramifications.
Abilene’s student government in the past has unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Taylor County elections office to set up an early-voting location on campus, McPherson said. The new law will make such a request even more challenging, said McPherson, president of the institution’s Texas College Democrats chapter. The private Christian college has only about 5,000 students and a low voter turnout as it is, and McPherson said she suspects the county office has denied requests because staffing a polling location on the campus would not be worth the cost.
Instead, the student group has tried to register as many students as possible, in the hope that they’ll travel across campus, and across a busy street, to a church where they can cast their ballots. To encourage this, the group has set up rides for students who need them, and, on Tuesday, threw a party allowing a large group to cast ballots on the first day of early voting in the state’s primary. But those efforts only go so far.
“I think that if there were a polling location on campus, the college students would be much more likely to vote,” McPherson said.
A New Bar for Florida Polling Places
Last year, Florida’s newly elected Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a law requiring early-voting sites in the state to have “sufficient nonpermitted parking,” a commodity often in short supply on busy college campuses. The Andrew Goodman Foundation, the League of Women Voters, and eight college students have since sued.
An early-voting polling location on the campus of Barry University would help Antonio Rodriguez and his classmates’ efforts to get students to the polls. The nearly 9,000-student private, Roman Catholic college in Miami Shores is about two miles away from the closest early-voting polling location, according to Rodriguez, director of political affairs for the College Democrats of America.
Getting to that off-campus polling place can be difficult for many students, especially for those without cars, since there’s no public transportation that takes you there. While the polls at a nearby elementary school are fairly accessible on Election Day, getting there can be difficult for busy students with tests or exams during the day, he said.
Rodriguez and some of his classmates and supportive faculty members have tried to encourage students to vote by inviting state political leaders to campus to speak, and creating events that allow groups to ride to the polls together on Lime’s app-based motorized scooters.
But despite the efforts, getting students to the polls when there is no nearby early voting center can keep even civic-minded students away, Rodriguez said.
Voter ID in North Carolina and Wisconsin
Many North Carolina college students don’t know what ID they need to bring to the polls in November, said Liam Hysjulien, that state’s director for the get-out-the-vote advocacy group the Campus Election Engagement Project.
In 2018, North Carolina voters passed a constitutional amendment requiring people to show an ID at the polls before casting a ballot. Initially, following the vote, Republican legislators proposed banning student IDs as a form of voter ID from private colleges in the state.
The amendment has since been declared unconstitutional by both state and federal courts. But the high-profile drama surrounding whether student IDs would be accepted sowed a feeling of “chaos” and “confusion” for many students, Hysjulien said.
North Carolina’s voter laws are less restrictive for college students than are those of a number of states, including Arizona, Iowa, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, which do not accept student IDs at the polls at all, according to the Fair Election Center’s Campus Vote Project.
In some cases, colleges are stepping in to help ease students’ path to the ballot box. Wisconsin law requires that student ID cards used to vote have an issuance date, a signature on them, and be updated and reissued every two years.
Most Wisconsin colleges do not provide student IDs that are in compliance with the law, according to the Andrew Goodman Foundation. In 2012 the University of Wisconsin at Madison began issuing voter IDs to students that they can obtain on the campus throughout the year, including on Election Day. Stations that can print the IDs are available at campus polling locations on Election Day. And the university has promoted those IDs at orientation since 2016.
But it’s not so easy on other campuses in the University of Wisconsin system, said Mike Burns, national director of the Campus Vote Project. If students at those colleges showed up at the polls on Election Day and found out they didn’t have the right ID, they would need to “go to a different office, get the special ID requested, and then come back and be able to show it,” he said.
“And because you already have so many folks on college campuses taking advantage of the ability to same-day register,” he continued, “the lines just get incredibly long, between other issues and folks trying to actually be able to get out and vote.”
In the end, such extra work is the result of a political effort designed to stop perceived opponents from having a say in the Democratic process, said Thomas, of Tufts. “You don’t want your elected official choosing their voters,” she said. “You want the voters to choose to elect an official.”
