Student Interest in the Election Is High. So Are the Barriers to Voting.

Thirty years after the Rock the Vote movement promised to “engage and build political power for young people,” it’s clear that college students have gotten the message.

Students are showing a deep interest in the contentious 2020 election, lobbying administrators to make Election Day an academic holiday on their campuses and creating viral “Tok the Vote” videos on TikTok to encourage others to cast their ballots. Polling for the November 3 contests is already underway in many states, and participation among the 18-to-24 crowd could break records, if recent history is any guide: Turnout among college-age students doubled in 2018, compared with four years earlier. More than 40 percent of students cast a ballot in the last midterms.

Countering that enthusiasm is a brewing anxiety that some would like to see students’ collective voice silenced. In state after state, an array of complex and punitive voting laws — coupled with the raging pandemic and its disorienting impact — threaten to complicate the electoral process, and even disenfranchise potential first-time voters.

The roadblocks have forced colleges to expand their “get out the vote” efforts beyond the simple message that voting is important. Some institutions have devised new tactics and built on old ones to help ensure their students can exercise the right to vote.

“You can’t just presume that people are going to figure this out on their own,” said Mary A. Evins, director of the American Democracy Project for Civic Learning at Middle Tennessee State University. “Because they really, really don’t.”

Students often need help overcoming voter ID requirements. Or they might require guidance to effectively navigate the labyrinthine voting rules of whichever state they’re registered in — where they attend college, or where they’re from.

Following the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965, state lawmakers began passing laws “targeting” student voters with “surgical precision,” said Maxim Thorne, managing director of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which supports youth activism and participation in democracy.

“This is like a nonstop treadmill, or moving target, where you have to be so vigilant in every state to protect the right of students to vote,” Thorne said.

Some states have diminished students’ influence through redistricting, Thorne said. A campus might be gerrymandered into multiple voting districts, he said, which prevents students from becoming a formidable voting bloc in congressional or local races.

Another voter-suppression tactic: shuttering temporary early-voting sites on campuses because a new law mandates they be kept open for the full early-voting period, a rule that can be impractical or too costly.

Disputes over polling-place locations have repeatedly landed in the courts.

Last week a New York Supreme Court judge denied a petition from Bard College to move an off-campus polling site to its Annandale-on-Hudson campus.

The judge agreed with Bard officials that there were valid reasons to have voting on campus but nevertheless found that the lawsuit had been filed too close to the election date to make any changes. The Goodman Foundation joined Bard in filing the unsuccessful lawsuit.

Erik J. Haight, a Republican commissioner on the Dutchess County Board of Elections, praised the judge’s decision, telling a local public-radio station that the ruling “is a good teaching lesson for the students that if you don’t get what you want, you shouldn’t just run off to court and waste everyone’s time and taxpayers’ money.”

Last year, a Republican-backed law in New Hampshire began requiring that new voters who drive must obtain an in-state driver’s license and automobile registration — which can cost hundreds of dollars annually.

To justify voter restrictions, Republican politicians have repeatedly cited a need to combat voter fraud. But election officials nationwide agree that fraudulent voting is extremely rare. Far more common are partisan efforts to disenfranchise voters through legal, but questionable, tactics like gerrymandering political districts — a weapon used by Democrats and Republicans alike — or invalidating people’s ballots because they didn’t vote in the prior election.

Challenges for First-Time Voters

The Covid-19 pandemic adds another potential hurdle: Health experts have encouraged absentee voting, but mail-in ballots can be particularly daunting for first-time voters. In Pennsylvania, when voters forget to place their ballot in a required secrecy envelope (before mailing it inside a second envelope), it won’t be counted.

“We’ve been trying to educate students about that,” said Nicholas Williams, a communications fellow at the student-run Penn Leads the Vote organization at the University of Pennsylvania. The group created a special informational graphic to guide students on how to properly vote by mail.

In Tennessee, it can be hard for new voters to even obtain a mail-in ballot. People who register online must cast their first election ballot in person. For the sake of simplicity, Evins has encouraged many of her students at Middle Tennessee State University to simply vote in person rather than risk having their mail-in ballot tossed out for some technical violation.

Students are likely to register online to vote, particularly during a pandemic. But Ohio residents this year were unable to do that if their voting address didn’t match the address on their driver’s license.

The state called the problem a “glitch,” but it disproportionately affected college students, who change addresses often. Some students live in a different apartment every year.

Student groups across Ohio complained. Tiera Moore, student body president at Kent State University, said she recently participated in a meeting with Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, who she said promised “they’re going to try to make sure that’s fixed in the future.”

But the fix will come too late for the November 3 election, since Ohio’s voter-registration deadline has already passed. Students who were unfairly prevented from registering online still could have registered using a paper form and mailing it in — a time-consuming extra step in the process.

“We don’t really know how many students that could have prevented from registering to vote,” Moore said. “When they try, and they’re deterred from it because of something like that, they might not try again.”

Creative Work-Arounds

In some states, college administrators have the power to single-handedly remove voting barriers.

In Ohio, for example, many colleges provide a “zero balance” utility bill for students who live in the dorms. The bill serves no functional purpose — utilities are included in the rent that students pay. But the document can be used to satisfy Ohio’s proof-of-residency requirements.

In Wisconsin, state lawmakers passed a rule in 2011 stipulating that any voter ID must expire within two years. A standard college ID won’t do, as it is valid for four years.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison, as well as many other institutions, responded by creating a second student ID for the sole purpose of providing a pathway for students to vote.

Out of a total enrollment of roughly 40,000 students, nearly 8,000 have received the special voter ID, which costs the university about a dollar apiece in materials, plus the additional staff time to produce it.

The arrival of Covid-19 posed still another barrier to would-be voters unable to pick up the document on campus. The university’s staff had a solution: They created a version of the voter ID that students can download and print themselves.