Restrictions on student vote: Democrats are fighting back

The imposition by Republican-led states of restrictions that make it harder for college and university students to vote, ostensibly out of concern to eliminate election fraud, is being countered by voter-education drives focused on getting eligible students to the polls in the upcoming presidential election.

Four years ago, between 52% and 55% of Americans between 18-29 years old, 60% of whom were in university or college, voted for Joseph R Biden for president. His victories in the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania were secured by college and university-aged voters.

Biden won Arizona by 21,000 votes with the Democrats taking 126,000 more youth votes than did then president Donald J Trump. In Michigan, Biden’s net lead among youth voters was 194,000 which provided his win by 148,000 votes.

In 2022, 31% (the third highest figure on record) of college and university students voted in the midterm elections. Sixty percent of all youth voters (a category that includes college and university student voters), preferred the Democrats, notes a study published by the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, which is housed at the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University (TCCL, Medford, Massachusetts).

According to the study, The Youth Vote, prepared by the Center for Research & Information on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE, housed in TCCL), these student voters made up approximately 12% of all voters.

Sixty three percent of these voters – that is, 7.5% of all voters – voted for Democratic candidates. In Arizona, for example, both Mark Kelly’s victory for the Senate and Kathy Dobbs’ successful run for the governorship were owed to the 76% and 71%, respectively, of university students who voted for them.

In the 2022 midterms the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives, who garnered a five-seat majority. Yet, the Democrats performed historically well; normally, the governing party loses between 21 and 30 seats.

The difference was likely the large percentage of student voters who favoured the Democrats, says Jennifer M McAndrew, experienced director of communications, strategy and planning at the TCCL and spokesperson for CIRCLE.

Sohali Vaddula, national communications director for the College Democrats of America, told University World News: “If these patterns hold, I think that it’s very obvious that Vice-President Harris will clinch the votes of this voting demographic.

“At the end of the day, the college and university vote will make one of the biggest differences in her winning the electoral college, especially in the battleground states that will make or break the decision in this election.”

According to McAndrew, college and university students favour Harris over Trump by 21 points. Which is why the Democrats are focusing on getting eligible college and university students to the polls.

Claims of election fraud

The Democrats’ advantage among college and university voters is also the reason that over the past two years, Republican-led states – citing, but not proving, election fraud – have tightened restrictions on them.

The potential pool of student voters in Georgia is orders of magnitude larger than the 0.23% or 11,779 votes by which Biden won the state in 2020. There are approximately 7,000 out-of-state students at the University of Georgia and 19,200 at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), for example.

Accordingly, the Republican-led government of Georgia has passed a law disallowing the use of university-issued identification cards as proof of identity for the purposes of voting, even though these cards have the holder’s picture on them.

The requirement that student voters have a government issued picture ID, such as a passport or driver’s licence is especially onerous for out-of-state students, the majority of whom live in dormitories, because they may not have easy access to other pieces of photo ID.

Georgia has also cut in half the window period during which absentee ballots can be applied for, as well as barring counties from having more than one dropbox per 100,000 voters and limiting where they can be located and their hours of operation; this regulation has cut the number of drop boxes from 107 to four in Atlanta, the state’s largest city and where the majority of Black and Democratic voters live.

Additionally, Georgia has made it easier for third parties to challenge a voter in the polling place.

Even in states like Idaho and Texas, which in 2020 Trump carried comfortably, Republican legislators have passed, and Republican governors have signed, bills that prevent college ID cards as being considered a valid form of identification.

In addition, Texas has drastically reduced the number of polling stations on the state’s college and university campuses and has made it easier for third parties to challenge a person’s right to vote.

“Republicans are making it harder for people to vote because they already know that their base is pretty solid. So what they’re trying to do is suppress the votes of people who aren’t necessarily voting Republican, which includes a lot of young people, Democrats or swing voters,” said Vaddula.

“You can see that from the way they appeal to voters and do outreach. Just look at their rallies. They don’t draw the same crowds that we do.

“They aren’t doing the same social media outreach that we are able to do, not to mention that they’re not doing any outreach to young voters while the Harris campaign is because young voters’ values don’t align with the Republican party,” explained Vaddula.

According to McAndrew, some states in the Northeast, Upper Midwest (for example, Michigan and Wisconsin) and the West have made it easier to vote.

“Michigan now has same-day registration, online registration and, for state residents, automatic registration when a person turns 18. Research shows that same-day registration helps young people the most because they are often unfamiliar with what the laws are and they tend to move around a lot,” she said.

Electoral college

Unlike France or Mexico, for example, where presidents are elected by popular vote, in the United States, the popular vote is a secondary consideration. In the elections of 2000 and 2016, Democrats Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively, won the popular vote by millions but lost in the electoral college resulting in the election of George W Bush and Trump.

The electoral college allots each state as many electoral votes as it has senators (each state has two) and representatives, the number of which is determined by the state’s population; accordingly, California, the population of which is 38.9 million, has 54 electoral votes and Mississippi, which has a population of 2.9 million, has six, according to government census data.

With very few exceptions since 1917, electors vote for the candidate that won their state irrespective of the elector’s party affiliation.

One of the oddities of America’s electoral system is that it assigned the running of federal elections to the states, meaning that the presidential elections can be thought of as 50 separate elections.

Each state is responsible for compiling voting lists, overseeing the counting of the votes and deciding where polling stations are; in practice, these powers and functions are devolved to the county level.

County electoral boards wield tremendous power over college and university voters.

In what Julia Vaughn, executive director of Common Cause Indiana, told the website Democracy Docket was “an overt attempt to suppress the student vote in Tippecanoe County”, the three members of the county election board – all Republicans – broke with precedent going back four presidential elections and voted not to have a polling place on Purdue University’s campus in West Lafayette, Indiana.

“It’s really disturbing, given their history [of] making student voters have to jump through extra hoops in order to register and now making them go to extraordinary lengths to cast a ballot on election day. It certainly looks purposeful,” Vaughn said.

According to McAndrew, the message about student voting is as powerful a deterrent as are the formal mechanisms enacted.

The ancillary impact of very strict voter identification laws, she says, both confuses students, by raising the question of whether they are allowed to vote, and heightens nervousness about voting for first-time voters.

“If you start layering on these restrictions and, also, if there’s a lot of talk about voter suppression and restrictions, young people might get even more concerned and nervous about whether they really can vote,” says McAndrew.

In an American Council on Education (ACE) podcast, Peter McDonough, vice-president and general counsel of the ACE, discussed this issue with reference to a first-time voter and their need for education about their rights.

“If I were a first-time voter, particularly if I’m only a few months, located in a place I had never lived before, and I’m venturing to a county location that I've never been before, I would want to be confident.

“If I’m confronted by somebody who's questioning me or trying to in some way intimidate me from taking a few steps closer to the location to vote, I want to be confident of my right to vote. I want to be confident of my right to vote where I'm standing.

“We’re all more confident when we know how they [rights] apply to the situation we're in at the moment. And we're all more confident when we know the words to say to somebody about those things.

“So if a school can [educate students as to their rights] clearly, simply and in multiple channels of communication with their community, I think we’re helping the students.

“We’re also doing things that align with that obligation under the Higher Education Act to help enable voting,” McDonough said.

In support of student voting

Irrespective of the limitations on student voting that states and county boards of elections put in place, both the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) and the federal law support student voting – even for out-of-state students.

In 1972 in the case of Dunn v Blumstein, which originated in Tennessee, the SCOTUS affirmed the right of states to require “residency” to vote.

What Tennessee could not do, the court ruled, was create a residency requirement that creates “‘suspect’ classification penalising some Tennessee residents because of recent interstate movement.

Tennessee asserts that the requirements are needed to ensure the purity of the ballot box and to have knowledgeable voters”.

In a recent briefing document, Student Voting and College Political Campaign – Related Activities in 2024, prepared by ACE and the Washington, DC law firm Hogan Lovells US LLP, McDonough writes, that “requiring a minimum duration for that residency is unconstitutional unless the state can demonstrate that it is “necessary to promote a compelling governmental interest”.

Back in 1972 when the SCOTUS ruled in Dunn v Blumstein, approximately 25 of America’s 50 states had a 30-day residency requirement, a period the court said, “appears to be ample to complete whatever administrative tasks are needed to prevent fraud and insure the purity of the ballot box.”

Though he did not use the term “voter suppression”, which was not in common use in 1972, Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall’s majority (6-1 decision) focused on voter suppression when he wrote, “Tennessee may be revealing this impermissible purpose when it observes: ‘The fact that the voting privilege has been extended to 18-year-old persons . . . increases, rather than diminishes, the need for durational residency requirements.’”

Marshall continued: “It is so generally known as to be judicially accepted that there are many political subdivisions in this state, and other states, wherein there are colleges universities and military installations with sufficient student body or military personnel over eighteen years of age as would completely dominate elections in the district, county or municipality so located.

“This would offer the maximum opportunity for fraud through colonisation, and permit domination by those not knowledgeable or having a common interest in matters of government, as opposed to the interest and the knowledge of permanent members of the community.”

Summarising Tennessee’s argument that the SCOTUS rejected, Marshall wrote: “Upon completion of their schooling or service tour, they move on, leaving the community bound to a course of political expediency not of its choice, and, in fact, one over which its more permanent citizens, who will continue to be affected, had no control.”

While the present SCOTUS is significantly more conservative than the court in 1972, the 2023 decision in Moore v Harper, McDonough notes, is important because it ruled that “legislatures do not have exclusive, independent, and unfettered authority to set the rules regarding federal elections”.

The Supreme Court, McDonough adds, also stated that federal courts “have an obligation to ensure that state court interpretations of that law do not evade federal law”.

Some states permit voting on the first day someone registers to vote, that is, “day of registration” for voters. For others that require prior registration, federal law does not allow a state to require proof of residency that is longer than 30 days prior to election day.

The applicable federal statute is the Higher Education Act (1965), which, since 1998, has required institutions that accept federal funds (including federally insured student loans) to promote student voting.

Colleges and universities “will make a good faith effort to distribute a mail voter registration form, requested and received from the State, to each student enrolled in a degree or certificate program and physically in attendance at the institution, and to make such forms widely available to students at the institution”, the act states.

Taken together, the SCOTUS’ decisions and the Higher Education Act undergird the right of college and university students to vote where they go to school, if that is their choice, and the presumption that artificial barriers will not be constructed by local authorities to prevent their voting.

While McDonough could not speculate on a hypothetical case, he told University World News: “I expect we will see all potential avenues pursued in the ground game leading up to and past election day, including via strategic, targeted judicial efforts to enable and frustrate, restrict or challenge voting in battleground states.”

What universities can and cannot do

Under federal tax law, colleges and universities must remain non-partisan.

They cannot, for example, conduct voter education activities confined to a narrow range of issues or skewed in favour of a political party, endorse either directly or by implication a candidate, comment on specific actions or statements made by a candidate or promote social media platforms affiliated with the institution to be used expressly in support of a candidate.

Permissible actions include: creating and conducting voter information programming; participating in non-partisan voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities; using federal work study funds to support student voting; providing a shuttle service to polling places in the community; providing students with written confirmation of their residency on campus; providing students with summaries of the state registration and voting requirements; and making changes to the academic calendar that will make it easier for students to vote.

One simple way that an institution can help student voters is by distributing the online national mail voter registration form for students, McDonough told the ACE podcast.

Overseas votes

A special group of students who vote in but are not from their home district (which is normally defined as where their parents live) are students studying abroad.

According to Jacob Wesoky, executive vice-chair of Democrats Abroad Canada and president of Democrats [Abroad] at McGill, who lives in Montreal, Quebec but votes in Virginia, “overseas ballots [such as those cast by Americans studying in Canada] exceeded the margin of victories in Georgia and Arizona”.

Wesoky estimates that there are about 3,000 members of Democrats at McGill (that is, Americans studying at McGill) and a similar number at the University of Toronto. “These numbers do not include dual nationals, who can also vote in the US election,” says Wesoky.

He judges the popularity of the club by the fact that 500 students RSVP-ed for the presidential debate and so many turned out for the event that they had to turn people away because of the venue’s maximum capacity; 150 members of Democrats at McGill turned up for the vice-presidential debate.

According to Wesoky, since students are the margin of victory in close races, Democrats Abroad is conducting voter registration drives in France, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom, the most common countries the 300,000 Americans who study abroad go to.

“We need all of these votes, so we’re working to get them all to vote. A lot of people don’t know they can vote while studying abroad, but they can, and we are working to help them to do so,” he told University World News.

University World News contacted the (US) Republican National Committee and the Republican state committees in Georgia and Idaho for comment but had not received a response before publication.