New Laws in 27 States Could Keep Students From Voting

In the last presidential election, an out-of-state student going to college in Ohio wouldn’t have to do much to vote in the state beyond registering and bringing proof of residence—a bank statement, a utility bill or even a paycheck listing their Ohio address—to the polls. Some campuses ran buses all day to take students to voting places, making it considerably more comfortable than walking through the November cold.

This year, things will be drastically different. Thanks to a 2023 law, the Republican-sponsored HB 458, Ohio’s out-of-state students can no longer use those documents to prove their residency for voting in person; the only acceptable forms of identification are now passports, Ohio state IDs and driver’s licenses, and military, National Guard, and Veterans Affairs IDs.

That’s left Ohio’s out-of-state students with few options as Election Day approaches. They can vote by mail—although the same law shortened the amount of time to both apply for and return mail-in ballots—or receive an Ohio state ID card, which is free to people who need it to vote but invalidates their home-state ID.

“There’s a lot of trepidation around changing IDs,” said Jakob Burdick, vice president of UDayton Votes, a student-led, voter-registration initiative at the University of Dayton. Some students have told him they don’t have the time to go get the ID, while others say their parents are reluctant to see their home-state IDs invalidated. Grappling with the new law, Burdick said, has been the “biggest challenge” with registering voters this year.

The trouble in Ohio isn’t unique. States across the nation—primarily with Republican legislatures—have passed restrictive voting laws since the 2020 election, many in response to lies about widespread election fraud stoked by former president Donald Trump. Experts say that many of the most common new restrictions—including ID laws—are likely to have a disproportionate effect on student voters. That includes presidential swing states such as Arizona, which has passed four such laws since 2020; Georgia, which has passed three; and North Carolina, which has passed one. (On the other hand, another swing state, Michigan, has been lauded for passing laws in recent years to greatly expand voter access under its current Democratic governor and Legislature.)

The restrictive measures could be a blow to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, which is counting on a repeat of the historically high youth turnout that led President Joe Biden to victory over Trump in 2020. But new barriers could easily disincline college students—especially those already trepidatious about voting for Harris due to her stance on Israel’s war in Gaza—from turning out to the polls.

Students are an especially vulnerable population of voters for a variety of reasons. Many are first-time voters. They often live in a place that’s different from their permanent address. And they have busy schedules that can sometimes make it difficult to find time to vote. That means that even slight legislative hurdles to voting can make the difference between students getting to the ballot box and deciding to stay home, said Andrew Garber, counsel for the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a public policy think tank.

Among the laws that have the greatest impact on students are voter ID laws like Ohio’s, some of which specifically outlaw the use of student IDs or, as is the case in Wyoming, permit the use of student IDs from public colleges and universities but not private ones. (Those with no acceptable form of ID can get a free ID card from a driver services office.)

In a similar vein, four states—Arizona, Idaho, Indiana and New Hampshire—have implemented proof-of-citizenship requirements in which prospective voters must show their birth certificate or passport to register to vote.

“Proof-of-citizenship laws have the potential to disenfranchise eligible voters because they don’t have their passport or birth certificate just sitting around or don’t have time or money or resources or transportation to go to a government office and get a passport or get a new copy of their birth certificate,” Garber said. And it’s especially challenging for traditional-aged students, who often keep such documents at their parents’ houses.

Laws that make it more burdensome to submit an absentee ballot have also become common over the past four years, including measures shortening the window during which absentee ballots can be returned.

These restrictions may end up having a significant effect on students, many of whom live in a different county or state than where they are registered to vote. Over all, just under half of young voters in 2020 voted absentee, according to research by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, which was in line with the larger population that year.

Some of the new absentee laws also restrict who can turn in an absentee ballot to only the voter and their immediate family members, which means that colleges don’t have the option of assisting students by collecting and delivering their absentee ballots. Nancy Powers, associate director of Kenyon College’s Center for the Study of American Democracy, said that she is concerned about students’ willingness and ability to mail in their ballots.

“We know [within] this generation, it’s just not part of their life experience to use stamps. A lot of colleges are having to find ways to educate students,” she said. “We’re still discussing whether we’re handing out envelopes to facilitate this. There’s a lot of steps, and these are first-time voters … we want to make them comfortable with the process.”

Other laws passed since 2020 change when and where voters can cast their ballot, whether that means shortening early-voting periods, limiting where individuals can drop off absentee ballots or even banning drive-through and curbside voting innovations that arose during the pandemic. For students with busy schedules, an extra day of early voting or the convenience of drive-through voting could play a significant role in whether they make it to the polls.

Because most college students are new voters, registering them is especially crucial—and some states have taken aim at the organizations that help them do so. Three have added new barriers for the third-party voter-registration organizations that do much of that work on campuses, newly requiring them to register with the state government, as in Tennessee and Louisiana, and upping fines for errors in the voter-registration process in Florida.

Finally, the past four years have seen an increase in voter-purge laws, which involve more frequently removing individuals who have died or moved out of state from the list of a state’s registered voters. Purges sometimes erroneously eliminate individuals who have moved within the same state, which could be a danger to students.

“Students obviously move a lot. Between college and law school, I probably moved every year for eight years. If someone moved across county lines or even just down the street, election officials might take you off the list,” said Garber.

Experts say that one of the best things universities can do to help students circumvent these new restrictions is to ensure they are aware of what their state’s rules and deadlines are and how they may have changed from the last time they voted.

“All of these things really increase the importance of information—accurate, up-to-date information—about the rules that can come from campuses to students,” said Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director and senior counsel for the Fair Elections Center. “It really increases the educational role campuses need to play.”