In 2024, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) integrated the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s voter registration application programming interface (API) directly into its student information systems in an attempt to streamline the student voter registration process.
The integration came about following a 2023 proposal by the Students Learn Students Vote (SLSV) Coalition and the Institute for Responsive Government (IRG), who sought out CMU for its globally renowned reputation for technology, research, and innovation. In collaboration with SLSV, IRG, and the Pennsylvania Department of State, CMU was able to implement the API in time for its students to use it to register for the 2024 presidential election.
The state of the CMU student vote
A four-year private institution in Pittsburgh, PA, CMU has earned a reputation in recent election cycles for its robust nonpartisan student voter engagement and turnout, earning Gold Campus recognition from the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge in 2020 when it achieved a 70.6% student voting rate and 86.2% registration rate, and again in 2022 when it achieved a 39.6% voting rate and 75.5% registration rate - all figures at or above national averages.
This backdrop of robust student voter engagement posed potential advantages to the adoption of an online voter registration API in that it offered a strong outreach infrastructure to ensure student awareness of this registration method. It also meant that any positive impact on CMU student voter turnout and registration would mean clearing a high existing bar.
API impact and successes
CMU launched its voter registration API during its Fall 2024 student orientation week, resulting in more than 850 voter registration applications in the run-up to the 2024 election and 620 successful submissions to the PA Department of State.
According to CMU’s 2022 NSLVE report, as of 2022, the school had approximately 9400 enrolled students who were eligible to vote in US elections, about two-thirds of whom attended CMU’s Pittsburgh campus and thus could register via the API. That means roughly 10% of CMU’s student population that was eligible to register using this tool did so. Six-hundred-twenty also represents about a quarter of CMU’s eligible voters who were not registered to vote in 2022. While it’s impossible to know whether those who used the API in 2024 would have registered via other means, it’s possible that the availability of the API eliminated a sizable chunk of CMU’s eligible unregistered population.
Even the erroneous API registrations helped display the tool’s strengths. For the 230-plus students who tried to register using the API but were unsuccessful, follow-up was made simpler by a reporting tool within the API that tracked whether a successful response had been received from the Pennsylvania Department of State. Without this function, CMU staff would have had no way to identify students who believed they had registered to vote but had, in fact, failed to do so. While exact figures haven’t been made available by CMU staff, in subsequent conversations they have indicated that the majority of API submissions that resulted in a form error were later resubmitted successfully after corrections.
Following implementation, CMU staff members praised the API for streamlining the voter registration process by reducing burdens on student voters, who were able to register more quickly and seamlessly, and election officials, who were provided with greater data accuracy in the voter registration applications they were tasked with processing.
Lessons learned
While successful overall, the API implementation wasn’t perfect and offered several avenues for potential improvement in future election cycles. As noted earlier, of the 850 registration applications submitted, more than 200 were returned to the applicant due to error.
Some of the more notable issues were identifiable upon review: signature contrast rejected by the State’s system, students erroneously not accepting Pennsylvania’s mandatory declaration of age, residency and US citizenship, incomplete fields, and communication delays or downtime with Pennsylvania’s API. The signature issues proved particularly tricky, with myriad technological processes - digital image capture, image uploading, application functionality - resulting in occasional error. This led the CMU team to experiment with different signature framing practices, including using black pens on physical cards, and found that some devices worked better than others.
Critically, none of these items required changes to the underlying application. CMU identified a path forward: enhanced upfront training so organizers and students know the pitfalls before they encounter them; more precise error reporting so staff can diagnose why a submission failed and not just that it failed, and a refined follow-up (or “chase”) program with clearer language for reaching students whose forms weren’t accepted.
Data limitations and where to go from here
Certain aspects of the API integration are unlikely to be measurable in the foreseeable future. For example, without detailed visibility into the CMU students’ voter registration practices across all available registration tools, it’s unlikely that any data analysis can draw a definitive conclusion regarding how many new voter registrations were gained via the API implementation.
However, some qualitative findings may point toward future improvements. For example, through its student information system platform, CMU was able to prefill registration forms with student information that was available through other university systems. For students who live in campus housing, that information included the student’s residential address. Right now that same capability does not exist for students living off-campus, creating a different user experience for that subset of students. CMU doesn’t currently possess technological visibility into off-campus addresses to include in the voter registration application, but the absence of these figures is itself a finding and points to a potential granular reporting that could be built out in coming years.
Another potential improvement lies in the API’s rollout for future election cycles. In its first year, delayed API testing with the PA Department of State pushed back its implementation until after its intended launch date at the beginning of student orientation. With the API now up and running, dual strategies that separate the timelines of technical implementation and training, communications, and integration could ensure stronger adoption going forward.
The upshot
CMU’s successful integration of a voter registration API into its students’ online portal provides a roadmap for what’s possible through innovation and collaboration between college campuses, willing partners, and local election officials. In future election cycles this will hopefully become a model for higher education institutions throughout the US for fulfilling their obligations to promote voter registration among their students within an increasingly digitized student experience.
