Millions of students will need voter ID support in 2024
More states have voter ID laws. Fewer students have driver's licenses. Millions of students will need voter ID support in 2024.
Voter ID laws are expanding quickly.
Voter ID laws - including strict voter ID laws where you can not vote without producing a photo ID - are a fact of life for the foreseeable future for millions of Americans. Arkansas, Montana, Wyoming, Missouri, Nebraska, and Ohio have all passed new strict voter ID laws since the 2020 election. North Carolina’s strict photo ID law is now in effect after previously being blocked by courts.
States are also increasingly striking student IDs from the list of IDs accepted for voting or limiting the types of acceptable student IDs. For example, some states accept IDs from certain colleges and universities in the state and not others.
There is significant debate among scholars about the impact of voter ID on turnout. Inconsistent implementation of the laws by election administrators, “counter mobilization effects” where some people are mobilized to vote in response to the laws, and measurement challenges all impede our understanding of the overall effect of voter ID laws on turnout.
What we do know is that more voters - especially young people - are going to be affected by voter ID laws in 2024. More states are adopting voter ID laws or making existing voter ID laws even stricter. Less young people are getting driver’s licenses or other forms of photo ID before becoming eligible to vote. As the movement for 100% student voting prepares for the 2024 election, it is important to get accurate information about how many voting-age U.S. citizens lack the ID they increasingly need to vote.
Nearly 29 million voting-age U.S. citizens didn’t have a current driver’s license in 2020.
A new VoteRiders / University of Maryland analysis documents the scale of the problem we are facing. Using the American National Election Studies (ANES), we estimated the number of voting-age U.S. citizens who lacked different kinds of ID during the 2020 election. ANES features more than 8,000 interviews with voters. The large sample size allowed us to more precisely estimate how many Americans with various traits and life experiences had different kinds of ID in 2020.
Nearly 29 million voting-age U.S. citizens did not have a current driver’s license in 2020. These Americans came from all walks of life. They included 8.2 million Republicans (including 2.7 million we estimate have no photo ID of any kind), 15 million Democrats, and over 5 million who don’t identify with a party. Members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups were least likely to have any photo ID; Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans were about twice as likely as White people to lack ID. But many White people also lack these documents: we estimate almost 3.6 million White voting-age citizens did not have any photo ID in 2020 and nearly 12.9 million White voting-age citizens lacked a driver’s license. Over 30% of permanently disabled people did not have driver’s licenses.
In 2020, 3 million voting-age U.S. citizens without driver’s licenses lived in states with strict voter ID laws, including 1.3 million who likely did not have any form of acceptable voter ID. If all the states that have strict voter ID laws in place for 2024 had these laws in place in 2020, even more people would have been impacted. We estimate that over 4 million voting-age U.S. citizens who lacked a driver’s license in 2020 live in a state that now has a strict ID law in place for the 2024 elections. Nearly 1.5 million voting-age U.S. citizens in these states lacked any form of ID in 2020.
Voter ID laws are an even bigger barrier for young people.
Age predicts whether a voting-age U.S citizen has voter ID better than any other variable. Young Americans of all races, income levels, education levels, and party affiliation are more likely to lack voter ID than older Americans who are otherwise similar to them. Of the nearly 29 million voting-age U.S. citizens who did not have a driver’s license in 2020, more than 11 million were 18-29 years old. 18-29 year-olds lacked licenses at more than twice the rate of people over 30.
While our findings about 18-29 year-olds largely confirm what other studies have shown, the large sample size of the ANES allowed us to drill down to more specific age ranges. The VoteRiders / UMD analysis reveals that voter ID laws fall particularly hard on the youngest voters. Of the 11.5 million 18-29 year-olds without a driver’s license, more than 7.5 million of them were 18-24 years old. 18-19 year-olds were more than twice as likely to not have a license as 25-29 year-olds.
More than 15% of 18-19 year-olds reported having no photo ID of any kind. They were 3.75 times more likely to lack ID than 20-24 year-olds and 6 times more likely to lack ID than people over 30. While the 26th Amendment to the Constitution says that the “right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age,” voter ID laws disproportionately impact the youngest voters.
Voter ID support must be a key part of any student voting program, particularly in strict ID states.
These data suggest that campuses in voter ID states - and campuses that serve students eligible to vote in voter ID states - will need to provide voter ID support to a substantial proportion of all student voters. Even among the students that have unexpired photo ID, those ID cards often do not have their current address or their voting address, presenting a further hurdle in those states where proof of address is also required. For an increasing number of colleges, voter ID support needs to join voter registration, voter education, and voter mobilization as a core pillar of a strong student voter engagement effort.
Even for students who live in non-strict voter ID states, or states without any voter ID laws on the books, the complicated and ever-changing patchwork of voter ID laws across the country can cause frustration and confusion that deters them from casting a ballot. And all voters who vote for the first time in a federal election, regardless of whether their state has a voter ID law, must meet the federal ID requirements under the Help America Vote Act. Voter ID education should be mainstreamed into any and all programs that seek to educate voters, particularly new voters, and support them to vote with confidence.
One recent hopeful case study comes from Wisconsin, which has been a strict ID state since 2011. The standard “Wiscard” student ID issued by the University of Wisconsin is not compliant for voter ID purposes because Wiscards lack a signature and expiration date. In order to serve student voters, the BadgersVote coalition at UW-Madison set up a website - voterid.wisc.edu - where students could request a compliant voter ID that they could print themselves. BadgersVote also established “Voter ID print stations” at polling sites where voters lacking ID could get a compliant document with the appropriate address printed on the spot. More than 7,000 students used the service between September 1, 2022 and November 8, 2022.
Other examples from Wisconsin that have been successful include:
Extending student ID office hours on Election Day (in many cases, this office is in the same building as the on-campus polling location and most campuses use a single polling location).
Having a member of the student ID office onsite at the on-campus polling location(s) with their voter ID printer.
Prompting out-of-state students and students without a license to request a voter ID when they pick up their normal student ID and/or student transit card.
This is a non-exhaustive list of voter ID support strategies and not all these strategies are possible in all voter ID states because of the idiosyncrasies of the different voter ID laws. But these strategies are representative of the kind of programming that is necessary to provide the voter ID support that students need to vote in strict ID states. In order to prevent widespread disenfranchisement of student voters in 2024 and stay on track to eventually reach 100% student voting, our movement will need to design and implement these types of voter ID support programs at large scale in 2024.
The Upshot? Millions of students need voter ID support in 2024 and our movement has the power to provide it.
As long as more states are adopting ever-stricter voter ID laws and fewer students are getting driver’s licenses, voter ID will increasingly be a barrier to student voter participation. In 2020 voter ID laws already affected millions of students. Even more will be affected in 2024.
There are important actions that scholars, higher education institutions, and other leaders in the student vote movement can take to provide the voter ID support that students need. Scholars can undertake research projects to more precisely measure how many voters are impacted by ID laws. The VoteRiders / University of Maryland research team is currently working to field a new survey to do this. We would welcome the opportunity to collaborate with others in the SVRN who are interested in voter ID.
Leaders of higher education institutions can take steps to provide students with a state-issued ID or other acceptable ID for casting a ballot. The decline in the number of students getting driver’s licenses is not just a voting issue. Lacking state issued photo ID is also a barrier to employment and other forms of social inclusion. Higher education institutions can make an important investment in both the civic and economic readiness of their students by ensuring that all students who are eligible to get a state photo ID obtain one.
Lastly, everyone in the movement for 100% student voting can take steps to make their programming and strategy more “voter ID aware.” Voter ID laws change what is possible and necessary around student voting programs in many states. Taking the time to get to know the laws well and design programming around them is important. VoteRiders and Fair Elections Center are just a couple of the partners with expertise who can support you in learning more about the details of voter ID laws in different states.
Voter ID laws present a big and growing challenge. We believe the movement for 100% student voting is up to the task of finding creative ways to overcome the barriers they present.
Sam Novey is Chief Strategist at the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement.
Lauren Kunis is CEO and Executive Director at VoteRiders.
Teddy Landis also contributed to this article for the Wisconsin case study.
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