Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Virus threatens a long-anticipated surge in student voting

College students leaving campus due to coronavirus

Students move out of their dorm at the University of Michigan as schools across the country shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

College students were once hailed as a crucial voting bloc in 2020, but their momentum may be halted by the coronavirus pandemic that has shuttered campuses from coast to coast.

Registration drives, absentee ballot parties, political forums and new voter trainings are all on hold. Students are scrambling to chase down absentee ballot forms that were mailed to campuses but must now be forwarded to a home or other address. Newly designated campus polling places will stand empty for the remaining primaries, several of which have been delayed in any case. And students who return this fall will have little time to prepare for Election Day.


Even before the Covid-19 outbreak, college voters were having a rough year. Their preferred candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, was proving incapable of reversing former Vice President Joe Biden's commanding lead in the Democratic presidential primaries. Republicans have erected roadblocks to student voting in Florida, New Hampshire, Texas and elsewhere — including residency requirements and restrictions on early voting, campus polling places and the use of student IDs for voting.

But the coronavirus is the wild card that now threatens student voting power most directly. It's a sudden reversal of fortunes for a fast-growing movement to expand campus voting that had, until now, seemed unstoppable.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

College and university students, who number some 20 million nationwide, more than doubled their turnout between 2014 and 2018, from 19 percent to 40 percent, according to Tufts University research. And voters younger than 35 are emerging as the nation's largest voting bloc.

Surging youth activism has been fueled by President Trump's election and by younger voters' concerns over climate change, gun violence and other issues — helping to spawn dozens of new groups to boost student voting since 2016. More than 400 organizations, both on and off campuses, belong to a Students Learn Students Vote Coalition that promotes student voting and civic engagement.

These include the All In Campus Democracy Challenge, which gives awards to colleges and universities that boost voting rates, and the Campus Vote Project, which works with administrators, faculty, students and election officials to eliminate barriers to student voting. A subgroup of coalition partners that includes MTV and the Alliance for Youth Organizing has launched a "+1 The Polls" movement to open dozens of new, on-campus voting locations around the country.

Now leaders of the campus democracy movement are scrambling to regroup amid the broader challenge of moving all college and university classes, seminars and exams online.

On a group Twitter chat hosted Wednesday by the coalition, groups including the Student PIRGs and the Alliance for Youth Action described a massive shift from field organizing to digital organizing using all the available tools — from telephone calls and text messages to tweet banks and Instagram takeovers to Zoom video chats and virtual town halls.

Participants brainstormed ways to update students on the shifting primary and absentee voting landscape, and stressed the need to keep things fun with pop culture trends, dance memes and remote get-togethers, such as the "Couch Party" hosted this week by the nonprofit When We All Vote to text eligible voters.

But if voter suppression efforts succeed by making voting inconvenient, but a global pandemic is "the ultimate inconvenience," says Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts' Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. "We are all stuck in our homes. We are all socially distancing ourselves. And voting is a social act. People vote because their friends vote. People vote in packs."

Thomas and her team are urging educators and allies to spend the coming weeks figuring out how to engage potential student voters while they are off campus. This includes addressing both technical and motivational hurdles to voting.

Students need help with tactical questions about voter registration, absentee ballots, and whether to vote near campus or home. But the most successful campuses also help students to engage in and navigate political conversations, says Thomas. Like many civic educators, she sees the pandemic as a teachable moment.

"They should create opportunities for conversations, discussions about political issues that can be held online. They should be teaching about civic responsibility in the age of a crisis," says Thomas. "This virus presents an amazing learning opportunity on why partisanship in policy making can be so devastating."

Every Vote Counts, a student-led voter turnout group that has 50 chapters, contacts and partners around the country, is urging its student organizers to "really hit their administrative and faculty contacts now" to gear up for fall, says the group's executive director, Campbell Streator. The primaries are important, and several still lie ahead in such college-campus-rich states as Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York and Wisconsin.

But the group's real focus is on the general election, says Streator, when colleges will have just a few crucial touch-points — student orientation, move-in days, required classes — to prepare students for voting in the short weeks before Election Day. The goal, he says, will be "making sure that every student when they come back to campus in the fall is asked: Are you registered? Do you want to register?"

Variables that will affect student turnout include whether they live in states that vote entirely by mail — Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Utah and Hawaii — or in states with no-excuse absentee voting, such as Arizona, Florida and Georgia. Another factor will be how well Democrats and voting rights advocates succeed in their recent push to expand voting by mail.

The pandemic has upended voting for everyone. But for students, says Streator, it throws "an additional unknown, or an additional hurdle, into an already complicated process."

Carney is a contributing writer.

Read More

Electoral College map

It's possible Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could each get 269 electoral votes this year.

Electoral College rules are a problem. A worst-case tie may be ahead.

Johnson is the executive director of the Election Reformers Network, a national nonpartisan organization advancing common-sense reforms to protect elections from polarization. Keyssar is a Matthew W. Stirling Jr. professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. His work focuses on voting rights, electoral and political institutions, and the evolution of democracies.

It’s the worst-case presidential election scenario — a 269–269 tie in the Electoral College. In our hyper-competitive political era, such a scenario, though still unlikely, is becoming increasingly plausible, and we need to grapple with its implications.

Recent swing-state polling suggests a slight advantage for Kamala Harris in the Rust Belt, while Donald Trump leads in the Sun Belt. If the final results mirror these trends, Harris wins with 270 electoral votes. But should Trump take the single elector from Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district — won by Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 — then both candidates would be deadlocked at 269.

Keep ReadingShow less
People holiding "Yes on 1" signs

People urge support for Question 1 in Maine.

Kyle Bailey

The Fahey Q&A: Kyle Bailey discusses Maine’s Question 1

Since organizing the Voters Not Politicians2018 ballot initiative that put citizens in charge ofdrawing Michigan's legislative maps, Fahey has been the founding executive director of The PeoplePeople, which is forming statewide networks to promote government accountability. Sheregularly interviews colleagues in the world of democracy reform for The Fulcrum.

Kyle Bailey is a former Maine state representative who managed the landmark ballot measure campaigns to win and protect ranked choice voting. He serves as campaign manager for Citizens to End SuperPACs and the Yes On 1 campaign to pass Question 1, a statewide ballot initiative that would place a limit of $5,000 on contributions to political action committees.

Keep ReadingShow less
Ballot envelopes moving through a sorting machine

Mailed ballots are sorted by a machine at the Denver Elections Division.

Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post

GOP targets fine print of voting by mail in battleground state suits

Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

In 2020’s presidential election, 17 million more Americans voted than in 2016’s election. That record-setting turnout was historic and even more remarkable because it came in the midst of a deadly pandemic. A key reason for the increase was most states simplified and expanded voting with mailed-out ballots — which 43 percent of voters used.

Some battleground states saw dramatic expansions. Michigan went from 26 percent of its electorate voting with mailed-out ballots in 2016 to 59 percent in 2020. Pennsylvania went from 4 percent to 40 percent. The following spring, academics found that mailing ballots to voters had lifted 2020’s voter turnout across the political spectrum and had benefited Republican candidates — especially in states that previously had limited the option.

Keep ReadingShow less
Members of Congress in the House of Representatives

Every four years, Congress gathers to count electoral votes.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

No country still uses an electoral college − except the U.S.

Holzer is an associate professor of political science at Westminster College.

The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election. Thanks to the Electoral College, that has happened five times in the country’s history. The most recent examples are from 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and 2016, when Hillary Clinton got more votes nationwide than Donald Trump but lost in the Electoral College.

The Founding Fathers did not invent the idea of an electoral college. Rather, they borrowed the concept from Europe, where it had been used to pick emperors for hundreds of years.

Keep ReadingShow less