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Inside the Fight to Protect the Youth Vote

Republican-led efforts threatening young people’s rights to the ballot have sparked efforts to protect the youth vote across college campuses.

In response to increasing federal attempts to limit ballot access, lawmakers, students and college administrators are mobilizing to safeguard young people’s access to voting.

More than 80 percent of eligible voters aged 18 to 29 in key battleground states said that they “probably” or “definitely” plan to vote in the upcoming midterm elections, according to a recent survey. Despite this enthusiasm, deep concerns remain that thousands of student voters may be thwarted from casting their ballot come November by an absence of polling sites on college campuses.

On October 15, the first day of in-person early voting in North Carolina, more than 100 students walked 40 minutes to the Guilford County Courthouse to cast their ballots after a Republican-majority state board of elections denied requests for early voting sites at two Greensboro universities.

The students, from North Carolina A&T State University, the largest historically Black university in the country, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, had access to on-campus early voting during the 2024 election. While dozens of students advocated for adding the two polling sites, the sites were ultimately denied in January, with the board citing low turnout.

“Honestly, it took me back to the same fight that our ancestors were fighting years and years ago in the ’60s,” North Carolina A&T senior Tatiana James, the president of the university’s NAACP chapter, told The Nation. “Today, it’s the same fight, it’s just dressed up differently.”

In 2024, the closest polling site on campus was located at the Dudley Memorial Building, which features a statue of the Greensboro Four—the four Black students from North Carolina A&T who staged a sit-in at a segregated Greensboro lunch counter during the civil rights movement in 1960. “That’s literally the history of A&T. That’s our significance,” James, who is currently mobilizing students on campus to vote early, said.

At North Carolina A&T and college campuses across the nation, Republican-led efforts that threaten young people’s rights to the ballot have sparked efforts to protect the youth vote across college campuses. In an analysis of 35 states offering in-person early voting in 2020, 74 percent of college campuses lacked in-person voting options on campus, and over half of American college students did not have any voting option on campus.

Threats to youth voting rights extend well beyond the absence of on-campus polling locations. Restrictive residency and voter-ID requirements disproportionately burden young voters, who often move frequently and may lack accepted identification, especially in states that do not accept student IDs. Young people also face a disproportionately high risk of provisional ballot rejections and late mail ballots. For first-time voters already juggling coursework, jobs, and navigating an unfamiliar electoral system, these barriers can make casting a ballot especially difficult, experts said.

“For the first time since the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s, we have millions of Americans headed to the polls without clear federal protections to........

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