College students facing barriers on casting ballots
When students at the University of Texas were sent home this spring as the coronavirus pandemic shut downcollege campuses, Janae Steggall and other campus organizers scrambled to help students make sure they could still vote in the primaries.
But despite blasting out social media graphics, hotline numbers and digital care packages to help students figure out where they were eligible to vote, some students never got their ballots after they returned home — including Steggall, who leads a civic engagement group on campus.
“It was so disheartening to be extremely passionate about this work and to recognize and tell other people that voting is important and necessary to the health of our democracy, then to not be able to participate in it,” the 21year-old said, adding that when she called the county, officials told her they were not sure why her ballot never arrived. “You have to think: If I was stopped from voting, who else was stopped from voting?”
There are signs that younger Americans, who have historically turned out at the polls at lower rates than older voters, are more energized about voting this November than they have been in decades. Yet the pandemic has created thorny challenges for college students trying to cast their ballots this year — and their predicaments are growing more dire as state voter registration deadlines loom.
The barriers facing youth voters could carry significant electoral consequences for Democrats. National polls show voters under 30 are less likely to identify with a political party but more likely to identify as liberal or progressive, and that recent protests over institutional racism and police brutality of Black Americans
have galvanized their interest in the 2020 election.
More than15 million Americans have turned 18 since the last presidential election, and young voters turned out in historic numbers in the 2018 elections, forming a crucial voting bloc that helped Democrats flip control of the House.
Young support Biden
Among likely young voters, 60 percent supportDemocratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and 27 percent support President Donald Trump, according to a national poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. That percentage is greater than young voters’ support for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and rivals their backing for Barack Obama in 2008, according to the poll, conducted betweenAug. 28 and Sept. 9.
Students across the country are now working overdrive to organize online. Google Forms have replaced voter-registration tables
on campus. Hundreds of student leaders are sharing voting resources through a Slack community they created this year. Some have posted YouTube and Instagramtutorials about mail voting — one even parodying rapper Cardi B’s summer hit song in a TikTok video about the Postal Service.
“We tell them: ‘No matter what you do, keep in mind the real possibility of campus being shut down,’” said Steggall, president of TX Votes.
In a normal election year, college students voting for the first time grapple with a unique set of questions, including whether their student identification card is a valid formof ID at the polls. (The answer: not everywhere.)
They also typically encounter a barrage of activities aimed at urging them to the polls, including voter-registration drives on campus, candidate visits and raucous get-out-the-vote rallies.
This year, however, the quads are largely quiet — and many stu
dents have dispersed back to their hometowns or settled in temporary pandemic locations. Nowthe organizing work has gone mostly online, through social media.
Young voters have historically voted at lower rates than their older counterparts. In 2016, 46.1 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 cast ballots, the lowest turnout of all age groups,according to Census Bureau data.
But there are signs that voters under 30 could turn out in larger numbers this fall, researchers say, including the dramatic increase in turnout among college students in the 2018 midterms, said a Tufts University study.
The study found that 40 percent of students whowere eligible to vote cast ballots in 2018, up from 19 percent in 2014, and that youth turnout played a key role in determining the outcome in tight congressional and Senate races.
“With the pandemic and with the era of racial justice and inequality revealing itself, young people feel even more motivated,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a nonpartisan organization focused on youth engagement at Tufts University. “We’re seeing an uptick in all the numbers of voting engagement, as well as protest and marches.”
But while many Americans are turning to mail ballots this year because of the pandemic, that voting option can be uniquely challenging for college students — some of whom have never used the Postal Service or had to buy stamps.
Requirements in flux
Compounding the problem: Voting requirements are still in flux in many states, with new court rulings daily on ballot deadlines and witness requirements, leaving some faculty members and campus organizers uncertain about how to provide accurate and timely resources.
Although her school has gone fully virtual, 19-year-old Julia Clark returned to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her sophomore year because she couldn’t break the lease for her off-campus apartment. She decided to keep her voter registration in at her parent’s home in Virginia and requested her absentee ballot.
But the elections office unexpectedly mailed her a notice requesting a new application for an absentee ballot — which she would have missed had she not returned home for a brief visit to Virginia.
“I was already not excited to vote in this election” for either presidential candidate, Clark said. “But to make matters worse, the fact that this process is so strenuous and there are so many things I need to do and extra turns I need to take, it makes it even more nerve-racking.”