Voting rights advocates are examining voting infrastructure and laws in anticipation of high young voter turnout in November.
Four years ago students at Kenyon College in Ohio who wanted to vote in the presidential election had to wait in line up to 10 hours. Their precinct had two voting machines — one was broken — to serve more than 1,300 registered voters.
Before the 2004 election, voter participation among students had steadily declined in the years following 1972 when 18-year-olds first won the right to vote.
Flash forward to 2008. The youth vote has risen in the past three consecutive elections, and there are no signs that it will slow down, voting advocates say.
This year’s historic election is creating even more of a groundswell of excitement, particularly among this demographic. Activists say young voter turnout increased 70 percent during the primary season over what was seen in the 2004 general election.
But many of the problems students experienced four years ago in Ohio and across the country have yet to be fixed and may prove worse this November when even more new and young voters head to the polls.
Voting infrastructure, such as machines, outdated voter rolls and the number of qualified poll workers, has not kept pace with the rising number of students who want to participate in the electoral process, said Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director at the Student Public Interest Research Group’s New Voters Project. “Several barriers persist,” Jahagirdar said during her testimony before a congressional panel in September.
