These Students Voted Early. Now They Wonder: Will It Matter?

The specter of voter suppression hung thick in the air Thursday for Chigozie Amaeze, a junior international-affairs major at the University of Georgia.

“I was scared I would no longer be registered to vote,” she said, moments after voting at the university’s basketball arena. “I kept checking my registration every single day, to make sure I wasn’t removed for some reason. My friend, to this day, can’t register to vote. We tried everything to help her. That made me even more nervous. Could that happen to me? What if they said something was wrong with my name?”

College students in Georgia are especially sensitive to barriers to voting. They were energized during Stacey Abrams’s bid for governor in 2018, an election that many students say was marred by voter suppression. But this year students across the country faced voting challenges worsened by a pandemic that delayed the arrival of absentee ballots and confusion over where students studying remotely could vote: in their hometown or their college town.

News stories in recent days have chronicled marathon road trips that college students are taking to protect their vote from a byzantine voting bureaucracy, political shenanigans, or a strained U.S. Postal Service. Ciarra Malone, the Georgia state coordinator of the Campus Vote Project, said she was working with a student from Clark Atlanta University who planned to drive seven hours from Florida on Election Day to vote in person. A county elections employee had told the student that an absentee ballot had been mailed, but the student never received it.

That situation, Malone said, is not uncommon. “A lot of students, especially first-time voters, have a lot of fear around sending in absentee ballots,” she said. “There’s lots of mistrust in Georgia, especially after the 2018 election. Their biggest concerns are, ‘Will my vote count?’ They also wonder whether voting is worth it at all.”

Lynsey Weatherspoon for The Chronicle

A bright spot, Malone said, is that student activists have forced colleges to make ease of voting a high priority. The students demanded on-campus polling places, advocated for making Election Day an academic holiday, and encouraged colleges to help students understand confusing topics such as voter-ID laws and registration requirements.

Amaeze called the run-up “nerve-racking” and said the actual voting was the easy part.

The line at Stegeman Coliseum, the campus basketball arena, was short and socially distanced, and she was in and out in a few minutes. That was far different from early reports on other locations in the county. Amaeze lives a short drive away from campus, and parking for voters was free.

Over three days last week, more than 1,200 students voted at Stegeman, and a dozen or so who spoke with a Chronicle reporter moments after emerging — many sporting a sticker with a peach and the words “I’m a Georgia voter” — gave the experience positive reviews. It was fast, safe and convenient, they said.

On-campus voting at the University of Georgia almost hadn’t been an option, however.

A University’s Decision — and a Reversal

Jesse Evans is passionate about civic engagement. Evans, a high-school government teacher in Athens, took his seniors a couple of years ago to the polls to vote for the first time. “I really wish that becomes standard in civic education in the United States,” he said. “If you take students the first time, and they know where to go and have the experience, they’re likely to be a lifelong voter.”

So Evans — who is also chair of the Board of Elections in Athens-Clarke County — was outraged when the University of Georgia announced in September that there would be no on-campus voting site. His board over the summer had approved both the Tate Student Center — where student voting had occurred in previous elections — and Stegeman Coliseum as early-voting sites.

University leaders said the decision stemmed from “concerns about long voting lines and insufficient indoor space required to maintain social distancing necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic.” Instead they offered students a shuttle to the downtown Athens voting location.

The explanation made no sense to Evans: “The downtown office is very small. If it was Covid-related, it didn’t make sense that they’d cram students into a shuttle, send them down to a small location in the Board of Elections office, and have them wait in long lines. That would have been worse, not better.”

As did many students, Evans compared the university’s decision with the one it had made about football. “They were totally OK with allowing thousands of people on campus for sporting events, but not allowing us to set up an advanced-voting location. It was kind of bizarre to prioritize sports over democracy.”

Amid the uproar, the university reversed course and announced three on-campus voting days at Stegeman Coliseum.

For its part, the university said in a tweet that people making comparisons with football “should be able to recognize that football games will be played outdoors but we will still require social distancing by substantially reducing capacity in the stadium.” The university added that it had also eliminated tailgating.

In a statement to The Chronicle, a Georgia spokesman said the university’s Division of Student Affairs had conducted a campaign to raise awareness about voting registration, voting locations, and volunteer opportunities.

Malone, from the Campus Vote Project, said it was crucial for colleges to invest in on-campus voting. “If there are enough resources for your campus to be open during a pandemic,” she said, “there should be enough resources for you to protect your students so they can cast their ballot.”

Concerns About Showing Up

The students who voted last week at Stegeman were united by anxiety: Would their vote count? Would their fellow students show up to the polls? With the presidential and U.S. Senate races in Georgia extremely close, would some students throw away their votes on the rapper Kanye West?

“I know people who have said they’re going to write in for Kanye West,” said Frances Uwechia, a senior computer-science major. “I’m afraid we’re going to have a lot of write-ins for Bernie Sanders. I’m afraid those little things are going to be big enough to swing the election.”

Uwechia, who supported Joe Biden in the Democratic primary because she thought he would be most broadly acceptable to on-the-fence Republicans, was also worried that some students might stay home. Posting on social media and showing up at the polls are two different things, she said.

“Just yesterday I asked a friend who has posted a lot about activism and about voting whether she had voted yet,” Uwechia said. “She had not even registered.”

Several Biden supporters said the youth vote — constantly speculated about but almost always historically underwhelming — could actually tilt the election this time. The “double polarization” of Trump and Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, had “really activated the youth,” said Nate Wakeman, a junior marketing major. He described himself as “extremely moderate,” having decided to vote for Biden only within the past two weeks because he worried about the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act.

“Four years under Trump,” he said, “has created a strong yearning for change among students.”

Only one of the student voters who spoke with The Chronicle last week indicated support for President Trump, but that was no proof of a blue wave in Georgia. College students are generally more liberal than other voters. More Democrats are voting early than Republicans, who are expected to turn out larger numbers on Election Day. And many students said they knew classmates who wouldn’t be caught dead talking with a journalist about their support of Trump.

This is the generation of students haunted by The New York Times needle. Abby Kiefer, a sophomore double majoring in political science and statistics, was a high-school student in 2016 when she watched the newspaper’s election-odds indicator shift through the night from a greater-than-90-percent chance that Hillary Clinton would win the election to a less-than-1percent chance.

She had just voted at Stegeman and reviewed a printout of her submitted ballot, a new feature in Georgia that allows voters to ask for another ballot if something doesn’t look right. She said it felt good to vote in her first presidential election, knowing she had done all that she could. But her overwhelming feeling through Election Night, she added, would be anxiety.

“I want to be a person who just pops some Melatonin and goes to bed at 8 p.m. and just, like, doesn’t look at the news that day,” Kiefer said. “But I’m probably going to stay glued to the TV and get worried.”