[EL] report on college students and voting

[Dan Vicuna]

On March 23, 1971, Congress voted in favor of the 26th Amendment to lower
the voting age to 18 and submitted the proposed amendment to the states for
ratification. The Fair Elections Legal
Network<http://www.fairelectionsnetwork.com>is commemorating the
anniversary by releasing
*College Students and Voting: A Campus Vote Project
Perspective<http://bit.ly/ZNL46w>.
*This report discusses the ways in which election law changes affected
student voters in 2012 and strategies for overcoming barriers moving
forward.

The executive summary is below. Go to http://bit.ly/ZNL46w to read the full
report.

-- 
Dan Vicuna
Staff Attorney* and Campus Vote Project
<http://www.campusvoteproject.org>Coordinator
Fair Elections Legal Network <http://www.fairelectionsnetwork.com>**
1825 K Street NW
Suite 450
Washington, D.C. 20006
(O) 202-248-5348
(F) 202-331-1663
Email: dvicuna at fairelectionsnetwork.com

*Licensed in California
**The contents of this email should not be construed as legal advice.


*Executive Summary*

College students face unique barriers to voter registration and voting. As
new voters who have often recently moved to their college communities and
may even be new to the state, they are more likely than other voters to
lack basic information about the voting process. Administrators and student
organizations at colleges and universities have played an essential role in
helping more students participate in American democracy by implementing
institutional reforms that provide information and access to participation.

In 2012 students had to face the usual barriers to participation, such as
not knowing registration rules and deadlines, lacking acceptable ID
documents, and lack of transportation to the polls. In addition, a wave of
new voter suppression legislation that either disproportionately affected
students or directly targeted their rights compounded the challenges. In
some states, new laws requiring voters to show an ID at the polls either
excluded student IDs from the list of acceptable documents or placed
restrictions on students IDs that left few or none of them usable for
voting. Other states attempted, through legislation or public campaigns, to
intimidate students by making them believe incorrectly that voting in their
college community could have adverse consequences. Misinformation also
hindered efforts to increase student participation on Election Day. For
example, the Virginia State Board of Elections placed misleading
information on its website that incorrectly discouraged students from
voting in their college communities.

Despite these difficulties, college administrators and faculty, students,
voting rights advocates, and others played an important role in defending
students’ access to the ballot. Schools in the University of Wisconsin
system and private universities in the state took extraordinary measures to
distribute newly required ID documents before the law was ultimately struck
down in state court. In Pennsylvania, the Fair Elections Legal Network
(FELN) participated in a coalition that contacted most colleges in the
state, urging them to add an expiration date sticker to student IDs so they
could be used as voter IDs. The voting rights community won another
important courtroom victory when a Pennsylvania judge ruled that the state
could not enforce the ID law in 2012. In Virginia, FELN worked with the
State Board of Elections to remove the misleading information about student
voting from its website.

Young people constituted a slightly higher percentage of the electorate in
2012 than in 2008, and the work done on college campuses to encourage
student voting played an important role in that achievement. Campus
Democrats and Republicans joined forces at some schools to create
nonpartisan vote coalitions. College administrators worked with local
election officials to get campus polling places and provide them with
information that would lessen voter ID burdens. FELN worked with
administrators and students through Campus Vote Project to distribute
essential voting information that students needed to cast a ballot that
counted.

Campus Vote Project will continue to work with colleges and universities to
empower students with the tools they need for democratic participation.
With the high-profile partisanship of a presidential campaign behind us, we
hope to work with even more schools in 2013 on state and municipal
elections and lay the foundation for a robust 2014 program. For more
information on Campus Vote Project, contact Dan Vicuna at (202) 331-0114 or
dvicuna at campusvoteproject.org.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20130321/b2872de1/attachment.html>