At an April 15 retreat for donors to the Republican National Committee, Mitchell, a leader in the broader conservative push to impose new voting restrictions, called on her party to find ways to tighten the rules for student voting in several battleground states. Getty Images.

By Zachary Roth
Indiana Capital Chronicle

INDIANAPOLIS — A top Republican election lawyer recently caused a stir when she told GOP donors that the party should work to make it harder for college students to vote in key states.

At an April 15 retreat for donors to the Republican National Committee, Cleta Mitchell, a leader in the broader conservative push to impose new voting restrictions, called on her party to find ways to tighten the rules for student voting in several battleground states.

Wisconsin ‘Is A Big Problem’

“Wisconsin is a big problem, because of the polling locations on college campuses,” Mitchell continued. “Their goal for the Supreme Court race was to turn out 240,000 college students in that Supreme Court race. And we don’t have anything like that, and we need to figure out how to do that, and how to combat that.”

Mitchell falsely claimed that, thanks to President Joe Biden, people who apply for federal student loan aid are required to fill out a voter registration form.

A White House executive order does urge federal agencies, including the Department of Education, to offer voter registration opportunities. But no one is required to register.

Banning Student IDs For Voting

The comments about voting by college students deserve particular scrutiny because of an ongoing multi-state push to tighten the rules for student voters — including by banning student IDs for voting.

Mike Burns, the national director for the Campus Vote Project, which works as an arm of the nonpartisan Fair Elections Center to expand access to voting for college students, said the tens of millions of students enrolled in higher education across the country already face a unique set of hurdles in casting a ballot: They’re less likely than other voters to have a driver’s license or utility bill to use as ID; they’re less likely to have a car to get to an off-campus polling site; and they often move each year, requiring them to go through the registration process anew each time.

Few states, Burns added, design their election systems to address these challenges. Despite Mitchell’s fear about students rolling out of bed to vote, a 2022 Duke University study that looked at 35 states found that nearly three quarters of colleges did not have voting sites on campus.

Given this backdrop, “it’s just that much more exasperating,” Burns said, “to hear someone talk about intentionally trying to make that even harder, and to do it for political reasons.”

Surging Youth Vote

The issue of student voting has flared lately thanks to a recent surge in the youth vote. The midterm elections of 2018 and 2022 saw the two highest turnout rates for voters under 30 in the last three decades.

That’s spurred Republican legislators to take action. This year alone, three GOP-controlled states — Missouri, Montana, and Idaho — have tightened their voter ID laws to remove student IDs from the list of documents voters can use to prove their identity.

‘They Just Vote Their Feelings’

Efforts to make it difficult for students and other young people to vote are almost as old as the 26th Amendment, which went into effect in 1971, enfranchising Americans aged 18 to 20.

Following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision weakening the Voting Rights Act, Wisconsin passed a voter ID law that does allow student IDs from state universities, but mandates that the ID have an expiration date and have been issued within the last two years — requirements that many student IDs don’t meet. Though some colleges have created special voter IDs, advocates say the issue still generates significant confusion among students.

New Hampshire has often been a hotspot for efforts to restrict student voting. Backers of these efforts have at times argued that students don’t have as much stake in the community as other voters, since they might not stick around after college.

Back in 2011, Rep. William O’Brien, then the House speaker and advocating for a bill to tighten residency requirements, was even blunter.

“They go into these general elections, they’ll have 900 same-day registrations, which are the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal,” O’Brien said. “That’s what kids do. They don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings and they’re taking away the towns’ ability to govern themselves. It’s not fair.”

Burns, of the Campus Vote Project, said that kind of sentiment not only runs counter not only to the purpose of the 26th Amendment, but to any notion of voting as a civic good.

This is a formative process,” said Burns. “We know from research that if people start to vote at a younger age, they will stay involved. It puts them on a trajectory of being more involved in civic life for the rest of their life, and I think that’s a good thing.”

“Every community is better when more people have their voices heard. And that includes young people,” Burns added. “So regardless of who someone’s going to vote for, we think they should have equal access.”

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