Voting 101: What Universities Can Learn from the COVID-19 Pandemic about Increasing Student Voter Turnout

Abstract

During the 2020 United States Presidential election cycle, there were numerous challenges that college students needed to overcome in order to exercise their Constitutional right to cast a ballot. These included many unprecedented barriers related to restrictions intended to minimize the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing. But the ongoing pandemic only added to what is already a complicated process for college students. Even in a typical election year, they must overcome barriers that other parts of the population do not experience. Students are heavily impacted by election policies that are imposed on the federal, state and university level. From living in a different location than where they are registered, accessing transportation to get to a polling site, and receiving and submitting absentee ballots, college students need to proactively create a voting plan that addresses these concerns. Without a comprehensive plan in place, college students, despite their best intentions, frequently are unable to exercise this fundamental right of our democracy. In this paper, I examine existing legislative policies and registration deadlines to understand the effect that each had on student voting. In addition, I highlight key research that is being conducted about college student voting patterns and how this is correlated with student participation during the recent 2020 Presidential election. Looking at the additional barriers imposed by COVID-19, I developed a series of hypotheses related to the effect that university decisions and other factors had on student voter turnout, and, under these circumstances, how challenging students perceived it was to cast their ballots. To analyze these hypotheses, I conducted a survey of over 800 college students. The results of this research demonstrated a high desire for students to vote in the 2020 Presidential election, despite all of the barriers that they faced. This election came at a time when young people across the country were mobilizing to protest against racism and police brutality. Many youth voters were also driven by a desire to have a change in leadership at the federal level and remove President Trump from office. The findings of this survey show that student voter turnout and the perception of how challenging it was to vote were impacted by the university model (whether to be entirely in-person, virtual, or a combination hybrid) for classes. Not only was a particular policy itself important, but also the timeline when universities made each decision impacted perceptions of voting difficulty. Student voting rates were impacted by age, class year, and state policies (such as early registration deadlines). Student voting was also impacted by whether or not states changed their absentee voting process, such as automatically mailing ballots to registered voters or allowing COVID-19 to be a valid excuse for requesting to vote by mail, as a result of the pandemic. In conclusion, this thesis recommends policies that should be implemented on the federal, state, and university level. Universities have the ability to positively impact student voter turnout. When coupled with strong legislative action at the federal and state levels, colleges across the country can mobilize students in unprecedented numbers to actively engage in our election processes.