Young voters setting historic turnout
But ID requirements, lack of polling places among their obstacles
When he prepares to cast his vote in his first presidential election on Tuesday, Noah Foster, a 20-year-old junior at Carroll University in Wisconsin, will go through a mental checklist: Specialized school ID. Check. Proof of enrollment. Check. Proof of residency. Check.
Ride to the polling site. Check. “It’s exhausting, for sure,” said Foster, who plans to vote for Democratic challenger Joe Biden. “These are the little issues we run into that makes the process so hard.”
From pandemic fears to complex ID requirements to lack of nearby polling places, young voters in the presidential election are facing an unprecedented array of obstacles, activists and voters said.
“These are the little issues we run into that makes the process so hard.”
Carroll University Junior
The barriers – some unintentional, others allegedly by design – have sparked a wave of lawsuits from New York to Texas to try to ease access to the polls for young and first-time voters.
Despite the obstacles, youth voter enthusiasm is reaching historic highs and is expected to play a key role in Tuesday’s presidential election. As of Oct. 23, more than 5 million young people ages 18-29 had voted early or by absentee in the 2020 elections, including nearly 3 million in key battleground states, eclipsing 2016 early voting totals for that age group, according to statistics compiled by the CIRCLE research center at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
Still, voting rights advocates point to efforts across the United States to suppress the youth vote.
Many of the laws targeting young voters emerged after the 2018 midterm elections, when young voters made a surprisingly robust showing at the polls, said Brianna Cea, chief executive and founder of Generation Vote, a progressive youth-led organization dedicated to advancing youth voting rights. Turnout rates for millennials soared from 22% in the 2014 midterm elections to 42% in the 2018 contests, according to the Pew Research Center. In that election, 26 million millennials cast their vote.
States with Republican-led legislatures, such as Texas and Wisconsin, pushed the new laws out to try to stem the growing voting muscle of younger voters, who strongly lean Democratic, Cea said.
In Texas, voters can use a concealed handgun license as ID at a polling site but not a student ID – a direct impediment to student voting, said Drew Galloway, executive director of MOVE Texas, a nonpartisan youth empowerment and registration group. His group has filed several lawsuits in the state for issues ranging from making mail-in ballots less cumbersome to forcing counties to open more polling locations.
Texas leaders said the measures were put in place to prevent voter fraud, though there has been little evidence of widespread fraud in the state.
Obstacles aside, Galloway said he’s seeing an unmatched enthusiasm among young voters this year. Despite a pandemic that kept many students indoors through the summer, his group registered more than 55,000 new voters this year, up from 24,000 last year.
Evan Clement, a 20-year-old sophomore at Binghamton University in New York, encountered lines more than two hours long at the early voting polling site closest to his off-campus apartment. The long lines are a major deterrent: Students whose schedules are crammed with classes and study sessions won’t typically wait in hours-long lines, he said.
Clement voted Wednesday for Biden, despite the long lines. But he’s not so sure about his fellow students.
“There are institutional barriers that have been there for so long they’re preventing young people from voting,” he said. “That’s what we’re fighting to change.”