In a presidential election year, get-out-the-vote efforts on college campuses are typically robust as the fall semester gets underway. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has significantly altered the landscape.
Historically, voter turnout among 18- to 22-year-olds is particularly low. Many voters in that age subset are in college, so voting becomes an issue of mobility, said Bernard L. Fraga, associate professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Due to COVID-19’s effect on campus closures, “there’s just been this big upheaval this semester. You can imagine students register, and then have to re-register again,” Fraga said, as they face the prospect of registering in a place they weren’t planning to vote in or face the prospect of voting for the first time in a way they had not expected.
“Different colleges have different realities,” said Dr. David A.M. Peterson, the Lucken Professor of Political Science at Iowa State University. Yet, “the differences between the parties are striking enough that there is a lot there to motivate people. When the stakes are higher, people are more likely to vote,” which is likely why student voter turnout might be higher (and parallel Obama’s 2008 election), even if the infrastructure of pre-COVID efforts are not fully there, Peterson adds.
Typically, word of mouth is among the most meaningful ways to encourage voter participation, says Louis E. Caldera, distinguished adjunct professor of law at American University Washington College of Law (WCL). Nevertheless, according to Caldera, the get-out-the-vote effort on college campuses “must be thought of as part of the ongoing curriculum and engagement of students to see themselves as civic actors” — not only during an election year or in political science classes alone.
Students are likely to share messages and engage with one another because they know one another, which can boost voter participation, Caldera noted.
That is exactly what Eli Duncan-Gilmour — a sophomore at American University and founding co-president and treasurer at OurVote USA — is doing. OurVote USA is a grassroots movement dedicated to driving youth voter participation in the electoral process.
