Student Voters Lean Left — So the Right Is Making It Harder for Them to Vote

Part of the Series

Voting Wrongs

For more than a decade, GOP state legislators have sought to make it harder for students — a group that by and large leans left — to vote.

In 2012, Republicans in North Carolina eliminated the ability of 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister to vote so that they would be automatically able to cast their ballots upon turning 18.

The following year, Ohio Republicans sought to penalize colleges that helped out-of-state students register to vote in Ohio, by mandating that they only charge them in-state tuition. This is despite the fact that under Ohio state law, anyone who has lived in the state for 30 consecutive days prior to the election can vote — a very different criterion from the college rules regarding who qualifies for in-state tuition. As a result of this legislative sleight of hand, colleges thought twice before providing students with information on how to vote.

In 2018, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a lawsuit against a small county in Texas that students alleged was limiting the number of early voting days allowed on the predominantly Black Prairie View A&M campus. During that election cycle several states, including Florida and Texas, imposed additional hurdles on out-of-state students seeking to vote.

Fast forward to 2024, and GOP-governed states — their legislators in thrall to Donald Trump’s oft-debunked theories of rampant voter fraud — are again targeting student voters, seemingly as part of their growing effort to prune voter rolls and limit voter participation among groups that have historically favored the Democrats.

This crackdown follows a period of unprecedented youth voter engagement. As recently as 2012, 20 percent fewer 18- to 24-year-olds voted than was the case for any other eligible age group. Then, Trump came along and, in reaction to the policies that he was proposing on the environment, on abortion access, on immigration, and other key issues, young people started to pay far more attention to politics. That politicization process accelerated once Trump became president. In 2020, there was a huge surge in youth voter participation, especially among college students — a group in which two-thirds of those eligible to vote did so — helping to produce majorities for Biden in enough swing states to win him the presidency.

The lessons weren’t lost on the GOP. In the nearly four years since Trump began fanning the flames of a “stolen election” mythology, GOP legislators have worked out all kinds of ways to make it harder for students in their states to participate in elections.

In Idaho, for example, students can no longer use student IDs to establish their identity at the polls. North Carolina’s stringent voter ID law also excludes many colleges’ student IDs from use at polling places. In Ohio, out-of-state students who seek to vote at the college they are attending have to give up their home-state ID, including their home-state drivers’ license. If they don’t want to do that, they have to remember to register to vote in their home states, and to mail in their ballot in time for it to count. Students in Wisconsin recently reported receiving robo-texts warning them that if they voted in the wrong state, they could receive lengthy prison sentences.

Inside Higher Education recently reported that 27 states have, in recent years, passed laws that could have a negative impact on student voter participation. These include bills that target organizations that help people with the voter registration process — which is particularly important for young, and often first-time, voters. In Florida, groups that don’t follow the complex process to a tee now risk fines of up to a quarter of a million dollars. As a result, many organizations have pulled back on their voter registration work, and, today, Florida is among the states with the lowest voter registration rates.

Some of the proposed changes pushed by legislators around the country are especially outrageous: In 2023, a GOP legislator in Texas tried to eliminate all campus polling places. That particular piece of legislation didn’t make it out of committee. But, a few years earlier, the legislature did ban the distribution of unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, meaning that many students (a group that was particularly likely to vote by mail in 2020) who might have voted by mail had they known they had the opportunity to do so now may never find out they can. In Montana — where Democratic Sen. Jon Tester is in a tough fight against his Republican challenger in a race that will likely determine control of the U.S. Senate — legislators passed a law barring the mailing of mail-in ballots to residents who aren’t yet 18 but will be by the date of the election; another law eliminated Election Day voter registration, which has, historically, been disproportionately used by young voters. And during his ill-fated campaign, one-time presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy even proposed raising the voting age to 25, thus at a stroke eliminating the problem of pesky liberal students boosting Democratic candidates’ chances.

Late last month, the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School released a national poll showing Harris with a more than 30 percent lead over Trump among young voters. Even that likely understated the scale of Harris’s lead, since the poll also found that young Democrats were more likely to vote than were their Republican counterparts, and a massive gender gap, with women favoring Harris.

Trump isn’t going to overcome these numbers by a campaign of persuasion aimed at young voters, but the yearslong campaign by GOP legislators to pass state laws making it harder for young people to vote might partially accomplish this same goal.