The State of Student Vote: Summer 2022
A report on the progress of the student vote movement in its mission to achieve 100% student voter participation with 3 months to go until Election Day 2022.
Last month, we shared the Student Vote Research Network call for proposals and anchored it around three core questions.
How do we strengthen grassroots leadership committed to 100% student voter participation at every college and university?
How do we identify the most impactful tactics for mobilizing student voters?
How does everyone else, especially local election officials, help grassroots campus leaders succeed in moving towards full student voter participation?
Today, with three months to go until Election Day 2022, we’re thrilled to share the first edition of the “State of the Student Vote” report. As members of this network look into these questions, State of the Student Vote reports will share vital information about what is happening in communities across the country related to each area of inquiry. We hope these reports can serve as a valuable tool to inform new research and strategy.
The status of grassroots leadership committed to 100% student voting.
Our movement uses several tools to track and support grassroots leadership committed to 100% student voting at every college and university in the country. The most important tool we use is the “non-partisan democratic engagement action plan.” Local grassroots leaders use the action planning process to convert their theoretical commitments to 100% student voting into specific plans. Action plans also play a critical role in enabling non-profit partners to work together to support the efforts of local grassroots leaders on each campus.
As of August 1, 2022, 329 campuses had submitted action plans for the 2022 cycle. These campuses cover 40 states, and include 50 Community Colleges and 69 Minority Serving Institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Early data indicates that the quality of these plans is improving compared to previous elections. An in-depth analysis by the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge of the 92 plans that were submitted by January 24, 2022 showed significant growth in grassroots leadership across the movement. 50% more campuses completed a plan by the early action planning deadline than in 2020 and those plans were higher quality when scored using the Strengthening American Democracy Action Plan Rubric. An updated report including the plans that came in between January 24 and May 31 will be forthcoming later this summer.
Of the campuses that have not submitted plans, 594 institutions have made a commitment to develop a plan before the 2022 election. It is essential that our movement for 100% student voting focus on helping the grassroots leaders at all 594 of these institutions follow through on their commitments. Campuses that complete action plans will be in a much stronger position to improve their student voting rate both in 2022 and in future elections. Indeed, one of the strongest indicators of whether a campus will have a high quality action plan is whether they have had one in the past.
It is thrilling to see the movement for 100% student voting thrive in hundreds of campus communities across all 50 states. But we have so much work to do. There are still 2170 campuses where the movement for 100% student voting does not yet have a presence.
There is extensive practitioner knowledge about various strategies for strengthening grassroots leadership committed to 100% student voting - summits, trainings, simulations, and much much more. But there is limited academic research about these strategies. This research gap leaves communities without the knowledge and support they need. Scholars and practitioners can fill this gap by partnering to conduct more rigorous studies to understand how strategies to strengthen grassroots leadership work and how they work differently in different campus contexts.
Innovating and adopting the most impactful tactics for mobilizing student voters.
The Ask Every Student design community has been working with a representative group of co-designers to develop new tactics that move campuses towards full student voter registration and participation. Ask Every Student applies the “sociocultural cognition model of voting behavior” established through hundreds of Get Out The Vote (GOTV) experiments conducted by Melissa R. Michelson and Lisa García-Bedolla. This body of work definitively established that the impact of most voter mobilization tactics is context specific and conditional upon the various identities a voter already has. Ask Every Student applies this research by working with “co-designers” from diverse campus contexts to build flexible mobilization and education tactics and tools that local leaders can adapt easily to meet their unique community needs.
With three months to go until Election Day, 275 campuses are pioneering exciting tactics through the Ask Every Student Initiative. The tactics they are working on include
integrating voter registration into universal online campus processes until they reach every student,
working with key campus partners in athletics, student government, residential life and the Registrar’s Office to tie students’ formative campus experiences together with their civic identities as voters,
and leveraging federal work study resources to pay students and comply with the Higher Education Act’s requirement to distribute voter registration forms.
It is essential that scholars launch more mixed methods evaluations of these tactics so that we can understand how they are influencing student behavior and knowledge.
How everyone else can help local campus vote coalitions achieve 100% student voting.
For this summer’s State of the Student Vote report, we focused on specifically on how government partners are helping to create conditions where grassroots leadership committed to 100% student voting can be effective. In future editions of the State of the Student Vote reports, we’ll update you about other types of institutions as well.
Federal Government: The Biden Administration took a major step forward last spring when they sent a Dear Colleague Letter to every college and university that received federal funding to remind them of the requirement in the Higher Education Act to distribute voter registration and education materials. The US Department of Education has committed to putting out a toolkit to help campuses comply with this regulation in the most impactful way possible. But with the new academic year just days or weeks away in many places, the toolkit still has not come out! Understanding the impact of these government actions is a fruitful area for research. SVRN members Lia Merivaki and Mara Suttman-Lea analyzed state voter outreach plans created by state election officials to comply with regulations in the Help America Vote Act. Merivaki and Suttman-Lea found that huge variation in quality occurred because the regulations were loosely defined. This research suggests that the US Department of Education’s failure to accompany the Dear Colleague Letter on student voter registration with a toolkit to guide compliance efforts is limiting the impact of the Dear Colleague Letter. This matters because research definitively shows that this type of support and guidance from regulators can have a major impact on voter participation. A 2015 paper by SVRN members David Nickerson and Mike Hanmer (alongside Douglass Hess) tested whether trainings and reminders about National Voter Registration Act regulations increased the number of voter registrations generated at agencies covered by the regulations. The study found some impact from both emails and trainings for agencies that already had an existing commitment to complying with the NVRA. We need scholars and practitioners to come together to conduct similar research in higher education to understand how colleges and universities react to the HEA Dear Colleague Letter and what strategies most effectively prompt impactful compliance.
State Action Planning Requirements: Since 2018, California and Maryland have passed laws that support grassroots student voting coalitions by requiring campuses to develop voter engagement action plans and submit them to state election officials. Both states have dedicated support for the planning process in their state election official’s office, but California’s law includes significantly more support (including funding) and guidance for the campus planning process. More research is needed to understand the impact of these laws and the best way to implement them effectively. This is a research question with major policy implications. In addition to the millions of students who would benefit from effective implementation of the CA and MD laws, similar action planning provisions are written into the Help Students Vote Act which was part of the voting rights package that was passed by the US House of Representatives last year. It is possible that the Help Students Vote Act will become federal law at some future date and democratic engagement action plans will be required at every college in the country. It is critical that we take steps now to learn from efforts to implement action planning requirements at the state level in MD and CA in order to eventually get this policy right at the federal level and in other states.
State and Local Government Convening Power: In states where action planning requirements are not in force right now, leaders in state and local government are able to use their convening power to support grassroots campus vote coalitions. 23 cities and states already have a city or state “voting challenge” to support, network, and celebrate these grassroots efforts. Many of the challenges are either hosted by or supported by a state election official or other government entity. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these efforts are motivating for campuses and bring election administrators into contact with students and campus communities in ways that improve the service that election administrators provide student voters. More research is needed, however, to understand exactly when and how these programs most effectively mobilize institutional action by universities and improve election administration services for students.
Conclusion
The state of the student vote is stronger than it has ever been because we are getting better and better at thinking about the challenge of achieving 100% student voter participation. Getting to 100% student voting is not something that one or another of us will just figure out how to do one day. There are no silver bullets. Getting to 100% student voting is a journey that we can only go on together by each putting in our own unique understanding about our research or our community or our organization into a shared pool of knowledge where we can all learn together. That’s what we’ve been building in our coalition spaces for years. And we’re taking that ability to strategize together with scholars to the next level through the Student Vote Research Network. It is an honor and a joy to learn and grow together!
Sam Novey is a Visiting Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and a Consulting Community Scholar at the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement. He is a co-founder of the SLSV Coalition and the Baltimore Votes Coalition.
Clarissa Unger is co-founder and Executive Director of the SLSV Coalition.
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