Op-Ed: How Colleges Can Help Turn Out the Student Vote
In this HigherEd Dive op-ed, Muhlenberg President Kathleen Harring shares the strategies the College used in Pennsylvania to sharply boost student voting.
By: President Kathleen Harring Monday, January 9, 2023 00:45 PM
This excerpt is from an op-ed originally published in HigherEd Dive. To read the full article, visit the January 9, 2023 article.
Although midterm turnout data is still being crunched, it seems likely that young voters, many of whom cast their ballot for the first time, had an outsized impact on the results.
Americans aged 18-29 voted at the second-highest rate in three decades, only slightly lower than the 2018 midterm elections, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
But here is what’s surprising: Despite their impact on this election, only about 27% of this age group voted.
Colleges are in a uniquely powerful position to increase this number — and there are very few times in our country’s history when it’s been of greater importance. Our institutions are places with a commitment to developing independent and critical thinkers, where different perspectives should be encouraged and examined.
Nonpartisan and student-led efforts to demystify the election process coupled with an institutional commitment to encourage civic engagement can make a real difference in voter registration and turnout.
We’ve seen this work with outstanding results on Muhlenberg College’s campus.
During the 2014 midterms, our student-voter rate was very low — just under 14%. But that figure jumped to 48.5% for the 2018 midterms, according to the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement.
During the hotly contested 2016 presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the national student voting rate for all institutions was 52.9%, with ours at 63.8%.
During the 2020 presidential election, Muhlenberg’s student-voter rate rose even higher — to nearly 83%, making it among the highest in the country.
The college also recently earned a platinum seal from the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge for our 2020 student voter efforts. And the group recognized Muhlenberg as having one of the most engaged campuses for student voting in 2022.
Here’s where we focused our resources to make this happen:
Early, ongoing and peer-to-peer engagement. New Muhlenberg students are encouraged to register to vote almost as soon as they step foot on campus. BergVotes, a nonpartisan student organization that raises political awareness and engagement on campus, as well as student staff from the Office of Community Engagement, help students register during orientation weekend. They also have weekly registration tables in the student union to help students register throughout the fall.
These students and staff also answer questions in real time and through social media. They even hand deliver voter registration forms so students who want to register locally can easily do so.
Other student groups like the College Democrats and College Republicans canvas by “dorm storming,” which involves distributing voting information through the residence halls to encourage students to register and vote. They also participate in phone and text banks and ask their fellow students on our small campus, “Did you vote?”
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To read the remainder of the article, including learning how the College supported voter Education, Accessibility and Community Engagement, visit the original article on HigherEd Dive's website.
