How well are colleges protecting students' 26th Amendment rights?
Many students experience unconstitutional age discrimination in ballot access. Colleges and universities have many options for stepping up to ensure the promise of the 26th Amendment is fulfilled.
This article is the second in our series on the unfulfilled potential of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 and outlawed voter discrimination on the basis of age. You can read Part 1 here.
Higher education can help America fulfill the promise of the 26th amendment.
Colleges and universities remain ideal environments to ensure young voters are well equipped to exercise their right to vote and actively participate in democracy. The youth vote drove high turnout in the 2022 midterm elections. In spite of this momentum, barriers still exist for young voters on the path to the ballot box. It is important to examine how well higher education institutions safeguard and defend voting rights.
The passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 and outlawed age discrimination in ballot access. This was a critical moment in youth voting rights. By lowering the national voting age from 21 to 18, the 26th Amendment allowed a new demographic of voters to participate in building a healthy and thriving democracy.
But over 50 years after its passage, restrictive voting laws and restrictive election administration practices still often disproportionately impact younger voters in violation of their 26th Amendment rights.
Higher education institutions are well positioned to be at the forefront of protecting youth voting rights and fulfilling the promise of the 26th amendment.
Rutgers University Law Review recently published a special edition examining the impact of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. It included articles featuring students, scholars and practitioners addressing challenges that exist in protecting youth voting rights. It marks the publication of the first legal volume to be dedicated to the Twenty-Sixth Amendment since its ratification 52 years ago. In one of the featured articles, Institution as Citizen: Colleges and Universities as Actors in Defense of Student Voting Rights, Jonathan Becker and Erin Cannan of Bard College examine how well higher education institutions safeguard student voting rights through the lens of the 26th Amendment. By researching institutional tactics taken in order to support student voting and addressing the legal and institutional challenges student voters face, Becker and Cannan articulate the steps needed to fulfill the promise of the 26th Amendment and achieve 100% student voter participation.
The government has failed to safeguard 26th Amendment rights.
Upon its ratification in 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment triggered a series of restrictive state laws in New York, Indiana, and Texas to tighten residency requirements. Similarly, local officials and boards of elections also began changing residency policies, relocating polling stations far from campuses, implementing complex address requirements for students living in dormitories, and dividing college campuses to represent multiple districts. The impact was even more profound for students who came from communities that had been historically disenfranchised and who often were targets of voter suppression efforts, such as students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (“HBCUs”). Drawing upon experiences from Bard College over the span of twenty-five years and other institutions, Becker and Canaan’s article reviews the role of colleges and institutions as citizen-actors in defense of student voting rights.
"Institutions as citizens” can safeguard student voting rights when the government fails to do so.
The link between higher education and democracy is vital. Drawing from scholarship on the role of postsecondary institutions domestically and abroad, Becker and Cannan explain, “institutions as citizens should not only fulfill minimal duties” but “be more participatory, and ideally, justice-oriented by using institutional resources to aggressively pursue student registration, actively defend student voting rights, and mobilize to effect change in laws and practices that protect vulnerable student communities while promoting the same democratic principles they purport to uphold.”
How Bard fought to ensure the 26th Amendment rights of its students.
Bard College began its collective institutional efforts towards student voting and engagement in the late 1990s. The student voting experience at the time faced several barriers including questionnaires and polling locations located far from campus. In response to those challenges, students and faculty formed the Student Activists for Voting Equality which questioned existing voting practices resulting in the Dutchess County Legislature convening a special task force on student voting. The task force began improving local election administration on campus. Since then, senior college leadership, including the board of trustees and the president, have pursued a twenty-five-year effort to defend students' voting rights in the court of public opinion, in state and federal court, and in the town, county, and state legislatures. Over this period, students at Bard and in Dutchess county won the right to vote locally, Bard achieved a polling place on campus, and last year, based in part on this experience and advocacy of a coalition of good government groups, the New York State legislature implemented rules mandating polling places on college campuses with 300 or more registered voters.
With institutional support and partnerships with community partners including The Andrew Goodman Foundation and the New York Civil Liberties Union, along with a wider coalition of groups like GenVote, Common Cause, and New York Public Interest Research Group, Bard College maintains an ecosystem of engagement that ensures students’ 26th Amendment rights are protected.
What higher education institutions should do to fulfill the promise of the 26th Amendment.
Here are some ways that higher education institutions can protect students' 26th Amendment rights:
Expanding (or creating) strategic voter action plans for elections. Action planning support developed by coalition partners provide resources and feedback to formalize campus mechanisms that facilitate and encourage voter registration, engagement and turnout, and expand civic learning. Bard’s Election@Bard plan has evolved based on these recommendations and rubric, and has since expanded to meet institutional opportunities.
Providing voter registration information (and checking to make sure students are actually getting on the rolls and voting): Colleges and universities can provide information on voter registration deadlines and requirements, and assist students in registering to vote. This can be done through voter registration drives, workshops, and online resources. Beyond this, Becker and Cannan propose that institutions should pose the following questions to make sure that local election officials are processing completed voter registration forms as they should:
How are voter registration processes tracked?
At what rate are voter registration forms rejected and for what reason?
What is the experience of students at polling sites during early voting or on Election Day?
Do students have to travel far from campus to vote?
Are polling sites accessible by public transportation and are they handicap accessible?
Are students turned away by poll workers or forced to vote via provisional ballot due to concerns about IDs or other reasons?
Do student voters know what their rights are if they are challenged?
Are student absentee ballots or absentee ballot application forms accepted or challenged?
Have students been disproportionately purged from the rolls or otherwise made inactive? If so, for what reason?”
Enroll in the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (“NSLVE”): NSLVE data helps identify systemic problems that impact student voters and tracks students’ aggregate voter registration and turnout rates for individual campuses. The data can then expand the scope of planning to incorporate mechanisms to monitor and track voter outcomes, protect student voting rights and allow students to have their votes counted.
Institutional and Leadership Support: In order for institutions to maintain a justice-oriented framework, a commitment from senior leadership is required. Institutional leaders should work extensively with student and faculty groups as well as outside actors to empower, inspire, and protect student 26th Amendment rights.
Improving Communication Strategies: Communication strategies should be clear and accessible, educating students on voter registration and the election process. Strategies should involve messaging about the expansion and improvement of voter access for students and the institution’s position about students’ right to vote, including from senior leadership, campus election teams, and institutional partners. “This position moves the institution from being a passive voice simply encouraging students to register and vote to taking an active stand to protect their rights.”
Monitoring: Three major areas of monitoring often unaddressed in planning are that of voter registration outcomes, election day voting outcomes, and poll-site tracking. Monitoring these outcomes allows institutional teams to determine how well voter mechanisms are working. With regard to polling place, higher education institutions can work with local election officials to ensure that polling places are conveniently located on or near campus, and that students have access to transportation to and from the polls.
Engagement in advocacy and, when necessary, litigation. Sometimes when advocacy fails, it is necessary to litigate and engage the courts in ensuring that students’ 26th Amendment rights are protected. Higher education institutions can play a key role in enabling this kind of litigation.
The Upshot
Higher education institutions can help protect students' 26th Amendment rights and promote civic engagement among their student body. The passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment enabled higher education institutions to take on an increased role in promoting and supporting participation in the electoral process. Today these institutions remain a critical link in the movement to achieve 100% student voting. Their vigilance, advocacy, and institutional power are key to ensuring that the promise of the 26th Amendment is fulfilled.
As Becker and Cannan reflect in conclusion,
“It is critical that leaders at least partially take up the fight (for student voting rights) on its merits, because if they do not do so when rights of their own students are under assault, the legitimacy of the link between higher education and citizenship will be called into question, and the role of higher education in society will decline. When leaders of higher education institutions look away, and when they fail to defend the very values they purport to support and represent, they diminish the democratic promise of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, the links between education and democratic citizenship, and the democratic prospects of the country as a whole.”
Britah Odondi is the Senior Voting and Election Policy Associate at the Scholars Strategy Network.