Registering College-Age Voters: When a “Good Faith Effort” isn’t Good Enough

Last week, the Project Vote blog discussed the Higher Education Act, which requires that colleges and universities make a “good faith effort” to distribute voter registration materials to all students. Unfortunately, many colleges are unaware of this relatively simple requirement that barely addresses the outlying problems with voter registration access that students face.

According to a 2004 poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics, only 49 percent of schools even met the spirit of the law by making voter registration materials available on campus and only 17 percent of universities were in actual compliance with the act’s requirement that each individual student be provided with voter registration forms 120 days before the registration deadline. This data was compiled prior to a 2008 modification to the HEA that allowed schools to email registration forms to students, so presumably more schools are currently in compliance than the 2004 poll would indicate. However, simply providing registration forms does not do enough to address the numerous problems facing students.

It is critically important that universities make more of an effort to comply with the requirements of the Higher Education Act and do everything they can to help students register to vote. According to Project Vote consultant, Doug Hess and researcher, Steven Rosenfeld, between six to eight million college students are currently unregistered, yet once college students are registered, they tend to have the same or higher turnout rates than voters in other age brackets. In other words, once college-aged voters are registered, they are just as likely to vote as elderly and middle-aged voters.

So, it would seem that the key to getting out the youth vote would be making registration as simple and painless as possible. Yet, college students face a number of unique obstacles to registration that older voters do not. One of the biggest obstacles is mobility: Twenty-five percent of people between 18- and 29-years-old have moved within the last year, compared to only 8.55 percent of the general population. For students who recently moved into a dorm on campus, it can be surprisingly difficult to figure out what address to put on a voter registration form. Some school dormitories do not have a proper street address, or the school uses a P.O. box as a dorm address. P.O. boxes are not valid as an address for voter registration purposes.

Also, students are often misinformed or intentionally misled about the requirements to register to vote. Some election officials have implied or simply outright stated that college students simply do not meet the residency requirements and therefore cannot register to vote.  In 2004, the registrar of Williamsburg, Virginia, home to the College of William and Mary, announced that all students would be forbidden from voting in Williamsburg due to residency requirements. Williamsburg received a new registrar in 2007 and the policy was changed to permit student voting, but the damage was already done. Other registrars try more subtle ways to minimize student registrations, like falsely implying that registration can impact the student’s ability to receive financial aid from their home state.

For younger students who may be living away from home for the first time, these can be daunting obstacles. The goal of the Higher Education Act is to give students as much help as possible in overcoming these obstacles.  However, universities should do more than the bare minimum “good faith effort.”  Providing access to voter registration forms is important, but universities also need to provide clear information to students about how the voter registration process works, which includes supplying valid addresses for voter registration purposes and clearing up any questions about how registration could impact financial aid awards. University administrators should not view compliance with the Higher Education Act as a hassle, but as an opportunity to teach their students about the importance of voter registration.

Anthony Balady is a legal intern at Project Vote.