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Ensuring the Rights of College Students to Vote

Prompted by recent controversy in Virginia and evidence of unnecessary barriers to student voters in numerous states across the country, on Thursday September 25th the House Administration Committee held a hearing - "Ensuring the Rights of College Students to Vote" - to document barriers to student voters that exist across the country and ways to remove these hurdles. Students from the Maryland PIRG chapter, clad in bright yellow "Studentvote.org" t-shirts showed up in force, and New Voters Project Program Director Sujatha Jahagirdar outlined a series of barriers faced by students for committee members. Additional witnesses included Marvin Kristov, President of Oberlin University, Catherine McLaughlin, Executive Director of the Harvard Institute of Politics, Matthew Segal from the student voting group SAVE, and local officials from Virginia and Wisconsin.

In the days leading up to the hearing, students submitted questions for the witnesses on the New Voters Project MySpace page. Chairman Bob Brady (PA) picked the question - "Shouldn't colleges and universities have more than a "good faith effort" to further civic engagement on their campuses? Do the Higher Education Act Amendments of 1998 demand enough from our schools? Has this been effective since the 10 years it was passed?" - to ask the panel of higher education and local officials. The question was submitted by Nelson Chen, a CALPIRG student at the University of Southern California.

The Student PIRGs' New Voters Project is the oldest and largest non-partisan youth mobilization drive in the country. We work to register all young voters, regardless of political affiliation or political ideology. We work on the ground, at hundreds of college campuses, registering people face-to-face. This year, we’ve also added an internet component, where people can register to vote online.

If you go to www.studentvote.org, you can find an online voter registration form. It’s probably the easiest way for anyone to get registered. All you have to do is fill in the appropriate information on the form. Afterwards, an email with be sent to you with a pdf version of your state’s voter registration form. Print it out and send it to your registrar (an address where you have to send it will be provided) before the deadline and you’ll be registered to vote. It’s that easy.

You can also add our voter registration and get-out-the-vote application to your MySpace profile. Use it to register your friends online and send them reminders and gifts to make sure they get out and vote.

We’re also on Facebook! We’ve created a Student Vote application that you can add to your page. This will allow your friends to register to vote on your Facecbook page. You can also lay down challenges to your friends to see who can get the most people to vote. To get the Facebook application, go to http://apps.facebook.com/student_vote/.

The Ultimate College Bowl

This year, the Student PIRGs is teaming up with the largest youth voter registration programs to create the largest voter mobilization drive ever. Along with Declare Yourself, HeadCount, Rock the Vote and Why Tuesday?, the Student PIRGs has helped launched the Ultimate College Bowl. The UCB is a competition between colleges and universities to see which institution can register the most of its students to vote. The winner gets a free concert! For more information or to sign up for the UCB, go to http://ultimatecollegebowl.com/

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The Primaries

With youth voter turnout up dramatically in ‘04, ‘05, and ‘06, we knew 2008 could be a big year for the youth vote. We had an open field of candidates and a compressed primary schedule. In addition, more and more hard data showed that youth voter mobilization programs were effective. The one thing left to really mobilize the youth vote was for the candidates themselves to focus on youth. We decided to help make sure that all the candidates were paying attention to young voters.

In the summer of 2007, we launched our What’s Your Plan? campaign. We showed up at hundreds of fundraisers, town hall meetings and photo ops in the early primary states to ask the candidates face-to-face to talk to us about the issues we care about. Pairing new technology with classic organizing, we also launched big voter registration and get out the vote drives across the country to show that on-the-ground efforts to reach young voters work. Across the country, we mobilized 500 volunteers in 28 states to ask the candidates about their plans on issues like global warming, college affordability, health care and financial security. We also recruited and trained 250 “Caucus Rock Stars” in Iowa to mobilize 5,000 of their peers.

The What’s Your Plan? Campaign played a major role in injecting youth issues into the campaign and our voter registration and mobilization effort on college campuses drove college students to the polls. In part due to our efforts, youth turnout more than doubled in the 2008 primaries.

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