Removal of On-Campus Voting on Election Day Sparks Uproar at Purdue

This November, for the first time since before 2008, students, faculty and staff will be unable to vote on Purdue University’s campus on Election Day.

For four presidential elections, Purdue hosted voting sites at various locations around campus—most recently the Mackey Arena, located minutes from several residence halls and academic buildings.

But in August, when Tippecanoe County’s three-member election board released its list of early voting and Election Day sites, Purdue wasn’t included on either one, due to the security of its internet connection failing to meet new state standards. The following month, after Purdue updated its internet, the board still only granted the university a polling place for six hours of early voting time on one day, Thursday, Oct. 24, at the campus's France A. Córdova Recreational Sports Center. There still will be no voting on campus on Election Day, despite an outcry from voting groups and students.

“It’s our belief there is going to be some amount of students this year that aren’t going to vote because it’s such a far walk to travel. A lot of students don’t have cars,” said Jason Packard, Purdue’s student government president. “Whether that is intentional or thought out or not, that is voter suppression.”

The change comes only five weeks from an election that many believe will be decided by young voters, who came out in record numbers in 2020 and pushed President Joe Biden to victory over former president Donald Trump. It’s the latest in a long history of controversies over campus polling places across the country. Advocates for voting access argue they’re essential for student turnout and say that Republicans often oppose them in part because college students skew liberal.

Although students can usually access polling sites located near campuses, on-campus voting options can play a major role in getting students to the ballot box, experts say, because young voters can be easily dissuaded from voting—even by seemingly minor factors.

“A lot more young people than we might assume are intimidated by the act of voting, because they understand that it’s important. [Any] complication in the process … can overwhelm a young person already thinking that elections are kind of intimidating,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

First-time voters don’t always think to make a plan ahead of Election Day and end up finding themselves unable to vote, she said—whether it’s because they don’t have transportation to the polls, don’t have time between classes to wait in a long line or encounter another unexpected barrier on the day.

Voter Suppression Concerns

Randy Vonderheide, the chairman of the county election board and a Republican, said the board’s decision was based in part on shifting campus voter demographics. In 2020, almost 6,700 students who lived at Purdue were registered to vote in Tippecanoe County, according to reporting in the local news site Based in Lafayette. Today, that number has dropped to about 3,000, possibly due to a higher number of students voting by mail in their hometown districts.

He also stressed that early voting is a vital part of the county’s voting infrastructure. “What other people don’t seem to be aware of—we do a lot of early voting in Tippecanoe County. We have for years, since we switched to the voter center concept,” Vonderheide said, referencing the model by which residents can vote at any polling place in the county. “The machines we use for early voting cannot be used on Election Day, so we have to be judicious about how we allocate our machines.”

Not everyone buys the board’s rationale. Advocates for on-campus voting note that the decline in registered student voters at Purdue does not take into account that employees can vote on campus. They also say that while 3,000 is significantly fewer registered student voters than in previous presidential election years, it’s still too many to accommodate at another polling place without significant lines ensuing.

While the election board has pointed out that the nearest polling place, West Lafayette City Hall, is only three blocks from the campus’s western border, that’s still well over a mile from residence halls on the opposite side of campus.

"The situation now really becomes one of voter suppression. They talk about the near voting sites students could walk to, but it requires them to put in extra effort, which is a barrier,” said Barb Clark, co-executive of the League of Women Voters of Greater Lafayette and a former Purdue employee who said she voted on campus no fewer than 10 times during her tenure there.

She also questioned why, if the internet connection issue was fixed to allow early voting on campus, the campus was not also cleared as a site for voting on Election Day.

When asked for comment, Purdue directed Inside Higher Ed to three previously published statements on the situation, one of which expressed support for the election board’s decisions.

A Long-Standing Challenge

Purdue students aren’t alone. The removal of campus polling places has long been a concern for voting-access advocates. On top of the fact that it creates a barrier for student voters, it also makes it harder for colleges and universities to develop consistent strategies for on-campus voting year over year.

Bard College is now entering its fifth year as a polling site, and the “predictability” of the process has been a huge asset, according to Jonathan Becker, director of its Center for Civic Engagement. He said that’s been true for the local board of elections, which has improved the efficiency with which they run a voting site, as well as for the students and community members who have the benefit of going to the same place to vote from one election to the next.

After 15 years trying to get a polling place on Bard’s campus, Becker successfully advocated for on-campus voting to be enshrined into law in New York. In 2022, the State Legislature passed a bill that required any institution with over 300 registered voters to have its own polling place—or one at a nearby location recommended by the college. Localities have been slow to implement the new law, and many campuses still won’t have a polling place for this election. But those that do host voting sites know they won’t be going away any time soon, Becker said.

At least five other states—California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota and Wyoming—have laws mandating or encouraging polling places on college campuses. But other states have gone in the opposite direction. A sweeping Florida election bill passed in 2019 banned early voting sites that lack “sufficient nonpermitted parking,” eliminating the possibility for many college campuses to host early voting.

Without a state mandate, the location of polling places is typically determined by county election boards—which can be influenced by partisan politics.

Erik Haight, a Republican election commissioner in Dutchess County, N.Y., where Bard is located, is a vehement opponent of campus polling places. He argued in The Poughkeepsie Journal soon after the New York law was passed that it gives college students too much access to voting.

“Any time you super enfranchise some voters at the expense of other voters, that other demographic is fundamentally disenfranchised and clearly intentional, since transient voters typically are Democrats and/or vote Democrat,” he told the newspaper, adding that college campuses are unwelcoming to outsiders.

In sprawling Tarrant County, Tex., Republicans pushed this year to eliminate early voting at several of the county’s campus polling places—which accounted for about 10 percent of early votes cast in the county during the 2020 election—to the distress of students and voting-advocacy organizations. County Judge Tim O’Hare, Tarrant County’s top elected official, has argued that the locations cost too much to justify what he called low turnout and claimed that the county isn’t responsible for making it easier for specific demographics, like students, to vote.

According to The Texas Tribune, Bo French, the county’s GOP chair, in a newsletter said that reducing polling sites would be “a serious win for Republicans in Tarrant County.”

Students, faculty, staff and other supporters showed up in droves to a Sept. 12 Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting to ask the commissioners to maintain the campus early voting sites. The commissioners ultimately voted 4 to 1 to keep the sites and add a new location, with only O’Hare voting against.

Becker said that pushing to establish polling sites in locations that are specifically less accessible to any population, including students, amounts to an act of “hostility towards political participation.”

“The fundamental question, the real question that gets to the heart of American democracy, is, do we want to facilitate voting?” he asked.

Reversal Unlikely

Students, faculty and community members pushed vehemently for the Tippecanoe County Election Board to reverse its decision. Purdue’s student government passed a resolution urging the university and election board to establish on-campus voting on Election Day and to “extensively work together to ensure Purdue always has an accessible, on-campus election day voting location.”

Packard felt the resolution was important after the widespread backlash he heard following the announcement that Purdue had lost its polling place.

“The mile-plus walk to go to city hall during the school day feels unreasonable for many students from their perspective, and they wished there was on-campus voting,” he said. “This is something that had a lot of students upset. Online, there was a lot of outrage the first few weeks this was announced.”

But despite the backlash, it doesn’t seem the Election Board will agree to put an Election Day site on Purdue’s campus.

“Regarding elections, nothing is ever really set in stone, but it’s very unlikely that decision will change,” Vonderheide said.

The student government will focus its energy over the next few weeks on an information campaign dedicated to ensuring students know their options for voting and eliminating any confusion about on-campus early voting on campus versus Election Day voting off campus. Clark, meanwhile, said the League of Women Voters hopes to organize buses from campus to the West Lafayette City Hall on Nov. 5 to help ensure students and employees without transportation still get the chance to vote on Election Day.

“It will be a pretty big lift to get students to understand what they need to do,” she said. Even if they do, “it’s also a barrier for them to get on a bus of some sort and go to the election site and vote and then come back during their school day.”