Before winter break, Rick Andrews thought Barack Obama was a long shot. The junior at Washington University in St. Louis liked Mr. Obama, but not his chances.
“I got a lot more excited about voting in Missouri after he won in Iowa,” Mr. Andrews says.
But the deadline for registering to vote in Missouri was January 9, when he was driving back to St. Louis from his parents’ house in Acton, Mass. He is still fired up about Mr. Obama, but he won’t be able to vote in Missouri or in Massachusetts.
“Ultimately it’s still my responsibility to keep track of all the dates and do what I need to do,” he says. But early voter-registration deadlines, he adds, put students at a disadvantage.
Stories of transient students missing deadlines or being misled about their voting rights are nothing new. But this year, the role younger voters played in Mr. Obama’s win in Iowa seems to have motivated a wave of college students in other states.
Some of those students—and the campaigns courting them—are out of luck. The deadlines for more than two-thirds of the Super Tuesday states, which vote February 5, have already passed.
But organizations that register, educate, and protect student voters are redoubling their efforts this election cycle. Advocacy groups are lobbying for laws—like Election Day registration—that favor student voters.
And political activists attribute high youth turnouts in Iowa and New Hampshire to eight years of rigorous, on-the-ground organizing. Research has shown what gets students to the polls: live, peer-to-peer contact, not the concerts and celebrity endorsements of the 1990s.
Financial support for reaching out to student voters also has the potential to grow significantly this year, says Jane Fleming Kleeb, executive director of the Young Voter Political Action Committee, a Democratic group. Four years ago, she says, prospective donors “kind of patted us on the head and said, ‘Isn’t it great that you young people are involved, but we’re not going to invest any money in this.’”
Now, she says, traditional Democratic donors are starting to pay attention to young voters—especially their support for Senator Obama—and may underwrite expanded get-out-the-vote efforts. The Democratic National Committee is already planning to dispatch student advocates to each state this fall.
“I definitely get the sense from the big donors that they will go full speed ahead if Obama wins the primary,” says Ms. Kleeb. “For an electoral success, they’ll look to young voters.”
Persistent Challenges
Many students who go away to college want to register to vote where they are in school. In some states it is relatively easy. Minnesota and Wisconsin, both of which allow voters to register on Election Day, had the top two youth turnouts in the 2004 presidential election: 69 percent and 63 percent, respectively.
In some other states, voters must prove an “intent to stay.” Election law in Ohio has specific provisions about students, who may vote, it says, if they intend “to reside permanently in the Ohio county in which the school residence address is located.”
Courts have generally held that local boards of elections cannot subject students to questioning beyond what any citizen would face, but the decentralized voter-registration process gives county registrars a lot of leeway. This spring the Brennan Center for Justice will publish a guide to student-voting rights in all 50 states.
Cindy Padera, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, first registered to vote in Philadelphia in 2004, rather than in her hometown of Western Springs, Ill. “At this point in students’ lives, four years is a very long time,” she says, “and you make a commitment to where you’re living.”
But her commitment wavered in the days before the presidential election, when misleading fliers posted on the campus warned out-of-state students that voting in Pennsylvania could jeopardize their financial aid and subject them to extra taxes. Ms. Padera was almost deterred, but she did end up voting.
Filtering Out Student Voters
Intimidation tactics and disproportionately long voting lines on college campuses—most notoriously at Kenyon College, in Ohio, in 2004 (The Chronicle, November 12, 2004)—led students to form the Student Association for Voter Empowerment, or SAVE, last year. With two dozen campus chapters in several different states, the group is also lobbying for laws that allow voters to register on Election Day and students to use their college identification at the polls. In July the nonpartisan organization met with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and it is now urging Congress to declare a “national voter-registration week” in September.
Matthew Segal, a senior at Kenyon and executive director of SAVE, says he is also fighting “egregious attempts to filter out student voters.” Last year, for example, a state legislator in Maine introduced a bill that would have made students living in campus housing ineligible to vote in that state. Mr. Segal’s group and others lobbied against the bill, which was defeated.
Amid such challenges, colleges are not doing enough to encourage students to be politically active, he says. A survey in 2004 by The Chronicle and the Institute of Politics at Harvard University found that a majority of colleges were not in strict compliance with a provision of the Higher Education Act that requires them to distribute voter-registration materials to students (The Chronicle, September 17, 2004).
Mr. Segal suspects that is still the case.
That is why he drafted the American College & University Presidents Commitment to Civic Engagement, modeled after the popular Presidents Climate Commitment. Those who sign on pledge to support students’ voting rights in several specific ways, such as allowing campus organizations to go into residence halls during registration drives and providing permanent funds to support nonpartisan voting campaigns.
On the Ground
Meanwhile, partisan and nonpartisan groups are running campus registration drives with increasingly sophisticated tactics.
“We know from studies of our ’04 model that if you register a person face to face and then you go back and recontact them personally three times, there’s an 86.3-percent likelihood” they will vote, says Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director of the Student Public Interest Research Group’s New Voters Project.
Planning a drive with the New Voters Project involves several mathematical calculations. Organizers decide what proportion of their student body they want to register, or by what percentage they want to increase youth turnout in their precincts. Then they calculate how many volunteer hours they need—one volunteer at a table will generate about four registrations an hour; class announcements usually yield 10. And then they recruit the necessary number of volunteers.
At that point, the model is “build, build, blitz,” says Sarah Clader, a senior at Rutgers University who led a campaign to register 3,000 voters in the fall. “It’s the whole idea of creating this buzz on campus,” she says, “just having there be one week when you walk across campus and you basically get asked to register to vote three times.”
A Gorilla and a Banana
The blitz at the University of California at Davis came a week before the state’s January 22 registration deadline. To attract attention, volunteers dressed in gorilla and banana costumes—both also wearing red “I Vote” T-shirts—and chased each other around the campus.
The gorilla, the banana, and other volunteers passed clipboards to students and looked over their registration forms for common mistakes (like forgetting to sign their names, or reading “county” as “country”). If organizers turn in clean applications, they say, they stand a better chance of getting along with their local registrar, who may groan at the sight of students with thousands of new forms.
At community colleges, organizers plan voter-registration drives to accommodate students’ commuter schedules. The campaigns rely more heavily on class announcements, though volunteers also set up tables in parking lots or at bus stops, says Danny Katz, campus organizing director for California’s Public Interest Research Group.
In the Los Angeles Community College District, student volunteers make get-out-the-vote calls to friends and classmates in the evenings from home.
The goal of many of the efforts is to generate a culture of political participation, not a fluky spike in the polls.
Mr. Andrews of Washington University may not have registered to vote in time for Missouri’s presidential primary, but he has joined the university’s Students for Barack Obama chapter, wants to lobby for Election Day-registration laws, and plans to vote in November.
That level of engagement is important, says Steve Fenberg, executive director of New Era Colorado, a nonpartisan group with the tag line “Not Your Mama’s Political Organization.”
“Young people get excited about elections later than the rest of the country,” he says. The challenge is keeping them excited.
Mr. Fenberg’s group sponsors discussions with legislators in bars and runs voter-registration drives for off-year elections.
“We are really trying to create more of a sustainable model, rather than the circus model,” Mr. Fenberg says. “You know, setting up the tents and taking them all down the next day.”
