College students are often advised to make a plan to vote, if they鈥檙e going to be living on campus during a presidential election. But this year has already presented challenges for student voters that some may not have seen before.
Uncertainty is the hallmark of this semester, with leaving many students unsure until the last weeks of summer if they鈥檇 be living on campus鈥攁nd still unsure how long they鈥檒l be sticking around. And that鈥檚 created some special issues for students hoping to vote.
The complications begin with registering to vote. It can be done . But that requires identification, most often from a driver鈥檚 license, says Ethan Lower, a member of Kent State University鈥檚 Undergraduate Student Government, and a fellow at the Campus Election Engagement Project, a national, non-partisan non-profit. He notes that many of the addresses on those driver鈥檚 licenses differ from the campus addresses many students use to vote.
鈥淪tudents should be able to register here and vote here,鈥� he said.
Lower is a critic of the state law that, in practice, requires new voters to go back and forth between two web sites: the Ohio secretary of state and Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
鈥淵ou don鈥檛 have to vote. I would love you to, but you should have that option at all times to be able to vote. It should be easy, and it should be inexpensive and it should be safe,鈥� Lower said.
Students could have updated their driver鈥檚 license addresses to their campus addresses online. But a change on a license applies to a lot more than voting.
Nate Hall is Ohio鈥檚 director of the Campus Election Engagement Project for the . Given the complications, he was recommending young people register to vote by the U.S. mail to avoid the runaround.
鈥淭he traditional paper voter registration form is not encountering any of these problems. You can still use the paper registration form and should be able to register to vote at your on-campus address,鈥� he said.
But old-fashioned mail is not the native language of many younger people.
Registration may have been an early complication, but it鈥檚 not the only one. Like millions of other voters, Hall notes that students are trying to decide whether to vote by mail, show up for early in-person voting at their boards of elections, or to wait for Election Day Nov. 3.
鈥淚t鈥檚 hard to make that plan when you don鈥檛 know where you鈥檙e physically going to be,鈥� Hall said.
And engaging newly registered voters also has grown more complicated. In any other election year, Lower would be organizing in-person events on Kent鈥檚 campus.
鈥淲e鈥檇 be out tabling. We鈥檇 be hosting large in-person events like we had planned for the primaries," he said.
He says something鈥檚 lost with virtual-only events.
鈥淭he most effective kinds of civic engagement have proven to be in-person so it鈥檚 difficult to try and rely on an entirely virtual campaign, but we鈥檙e doing the best we can,鈥� Hall said.
Bree Chambers is a student at Capital University and a leader of the , a group whose goals are to fight for marginalized communities. She has opted to stay home this semester and do distance learning. She acknowledges campus connections have grown more complicated but says the best civic engagement happens among close friends.
鈥淭o make sure that the people closest to you, in those inner circles, know the process," she said. 鈥淭he circumstances are pretty dire. And so it is my hope that they have people in their lives, or that I can be a person in someone鈥檚 life, to explain to them exactly what the consequences of their vote may be for either side of things."
Despite challenges for students planning on voting this year, excitement hasn鈥檛 dwindled. Recent studies by Harvard University and the Knight Foundation show people aged 18 to 29 are increasingly interested in voting this year.
Kent鈥檚 Lower says it鈥檚 a level of engagement that has elements of enthusiasm, urgency and anxiety, including whether their votes will count.
