As college campuses gear up for another election cycle, a wave of nonpartisan efforts is registering students, training poll workers, and driving turnout at record levels. Yet these same efforts now face mounting resistance, including a Trump administration investigation into NSLVE, the primary data source tracking campus voting, and partisan accusations that get-out-the-vote work is politically motivated. This episode of Terms of Engagement brings together hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer with Jen Domagal-Goldman, the executive director of the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, and Yael Bromberg, a constitutional rights attorney and leading scholar on the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, to unpack what’s really happening on campuses today. Domagal-Goldman draws on her work with more than 1,000 colleges and universities to explain what’s driving student engagement and where new obstacles are emerging. Bromberg brings the legal lens, connecting these on-the-ground challenges to constitutional protections for young voters and the legislative push to enforce them. The episode explores what’s at stake for the future of student voting rights and civic participation in higher education.
About our Guests:
Jen Domagal-Goldman is the executive director of the national, nonpartisan ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, a position she’s held since 2019. Prior to joining ALL IN, Domagal-Goldman directed the American Democracy Project, a national civic learning and democratic engagement network of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). She has contributed to a number of civic engagement publications, including co-authoring chapters in Reimagining Democratic Societies: A New Era of Personal and Social Responsibility (2013), Becoming a Steward of Place: Four Areas of Institutional Focus (2014), Student Civic Outcomes in Service Learning: Conceptual Frameworks and Methods (2017), and Leaning into Politics: Higher Education and the Democracy We Need (2024). Domagal-Goldman serves on the National Leadership Council to Advance Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement for All. She earned her PhD in higher education from Penn State, received her MA in higher education and student affairs administration from the University of Vermont, earned and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester.
Yael Bromberg is a constitutional rights attorney with more than twenty years of experience in community organizing, advocacy, and litigation. She is principal of Bromberg Law LLC, of counsel to the New Jersey labor law firm Weissman & Mintz LLC, and a former chief counsel for voting rights at The Andrew Goodman Foundation, a national organization operating in over 25 states across 85 campuses. At Rutgers Law School she teaches Election Law and the Political Process and supervises the International Human Rights Clinic; she is also a Visiting Associate at the Eagleton Institute of Politics. She previously taught and supervised litigation in the Georgetown University Law Center Civil Rights Clinic and Voting Rights Institute, where she earned an LL.M. in Advocacy with distinction, and at American University Washington College of Law. Her landmark article, “Youth Voting Rights and the Unfulfilled Promise of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment” (University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law), has been described as a “groundbreaking study” and a “legal and organizing call for arms.” She is the architect of the Youth Voting Rights Act, comprehensive legislation to enforce the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which was introduced in Congress by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Nikema Williams. She also leads A Mellon Foundation–supported research project that engages Bard College and three HBCUs (Prairie View A&M, North Carolina A&T, Tuskegee) in applied legal research. She was named NJ Attorney of the Year (2024) by NJ Globe and received the first inaugural Reclaiming Our Democracy Award from NJ Citizen Action.
Voiceover:
You are listening to Terms of Engagement, a weekly show from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, featuring ASH Center Director, Archon Fung and Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy, Stephen Richer. Now let's get to the show.
Archon Fung:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Terms of Engagement. I'm Archon Fung, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Stephen Richer:
And I'm Stephen Richer. I'm the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I am now a lecturer and a fellow at the Ash Center.
Archon Fung:
We're recording this show live, so if you want to join in the conversation, just type your comments or questions in the chat on YouTube and maybe some other platforms and we'll get back to you. Hopefully, bring your voice into the show. And if you're watching this after, you can always email us at info@ash.harvard.edu.
Stephen Richer:
I'm really glad you've taken over that responsibility because I could never get the email address switched for some reason?
Archon Fung:
Don't have to. It's on the chyron.
Stephen Richer:
I know, but I just like to start it a little bit or something like that. It's unbelievable. I like to think that I can memorize quite a few things, but apparently not that one. So as always, Archon and I are speaking on behalf of ourselves, not on behalf of the Ash Center, not on behalf of the Harvard Kennedy School, and not on behalf of Harvard University.
So happy election day. Today is yet another election day. Today is election day in New Hampshire, which does have more than presidential primaries. It also has its own elections, which is very important and very exciting. And so that is going on just in the nearby proximity to where Archon and I are in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But today we are talking about are the kids all right? And by the kids, we mean actually college students. So are the young adults all right or whatever we term them now?
And previously at the Ash Center, we hosted about a year ago a panel on the rightward shift or alleged rightward shift of Gen Z as a voting population. But today, we are going to talk about specifically college students, but also a little bit more broadly Gen Z voters. And we are going to instead discuss just are they participating? Are there any limits to participation, and what can be done to overcome those limits if there are limits to participation?
Looking this up, I found that youth turnout in 2024 was about 47% among 18 to 29-year-olds, and it was about 53% among college students. Here at Harvard, we have the Harvard Votes Challenge, which encourages students to participate broadly in civic life and broadly be civically informed, but also specifically encourages them to register to vote and then in fact vote. We know that this is one of a constellation of efforts across the Northeast and across universities. By no means is this unique, but it is one of, I think, hopefully the more robust programs that happens on college campuses. And to discuss this with us, we have two of the absolute leaders in the field, and Archon is going to introduce them.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, we're really fortunate today to have a couple of folks. The first is Jennifer Domagal-Goldman, who is Executive Director of the All In Campus Democracy Challenge, which is an organization that works with campuses, a thousand campuses, colleges and universities, to make non-student civic engagement a deeper and permanent part of civic life. She's been in the campus voting business and All In since 2019. And before All In, she directed the American Democracy Project, the National Civic Learning Network of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. She's written many thoughtful essays on the future of democracy and voting. And she is quite busy right now, so we're fortunate to have her time in this seven weeks before the midterms.
And then our second guest is Yael Bromberg, who's a constitutional rights attorney and a leading scholar of the 26th Amendment. She is a principal of Bromberg Law, LLC, where she focuses on democracy law and served as a special counsel and strategic advisor to the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which is a national organization that promoted voting in 25 states and 85 campuses. She was one of the chief architects of the Youth Voting Rights Act, which is a piece of comprehensive legislation to enforce the 26th Amendment, which was introduced in Congress by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Nakema Williams of Georgia. So welcome Jen and Yael.
Yael Bromberg:
Thank you. Good to be here.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Thank you so much for having us.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, good.
Stephen Richer:
So what is the state of affairs? What is voting like among the Gen Z population, but specifically with respect to people who are on college campuses? Did I get my statistic right? Was that consistent with what you guys have seen?
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Stephen, I think you did a great job describing that. One of the things we see on the whole is lower voting rates by young people. There seems to be a generational effect. It's not just today's young people, it's young people in general. And we can get into a lot of the barriers that first time voters face and becoming part of that process, learning and accessing the ballot.
And then we also know that college students are voting at certainly higher rates than their non-college going peers. And we think that part of that is the robust ability for campuses to be able to message some of that information and for students to be able to talk amongst their peers in a more coherent manner than folks who've already graduated high school and maybe only for the first time eligible to vote.
Stephen Richer:
How much of a delta are we talking about? How much lower is participation among 18 to 29-year-olds and college students than it is for say just the median American?
Yael Bromberg:
Significantly lower. I mean the voter margin, you're talking about an over 27 percentage point margin between voters age 18 to 24 and those 65 plus. So if you look at the 2024 race, for example, roughly 48% of young people voted age 18 to 24, 75% of age 65 and over. That vote margin determines the outcome of elections.
And I just want to elevate something else that Jen just said, which is that since the 26th Amendment was ratified, we're celebrating the 55th anniversary of it this year. Since the 26th Amendment was ratified, there has consistently been a significant vote margin between age cohorts. So that's an ongoing trend. So older voters today that maybe were around when they inherited the largest expansion of the suffrage, 11 million new voters, they might blame young people, "Oh, they're just tuned out," but they themselves were a part of that age cohort as well.
Stephen Richer:
Right. So just to put a fine point on it, for this upcoming November midterm election, about what percentage of, let's say registered 18 to 24-year-olds do we expect to participate to vote, to cast a ballot, and what percentage of college students do we expect to vote?
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
That's a complicated question, Stephen, and I'm not trying to blow it off. I think there's a few things happening there. I think there's clearly a lot of attention being played to the election right now. It's also a midterm election. We generally see lower turnout in a midterm election than in a presidential election. On the other hand, there's a lot of folks unhappy with the current direction of their communities or states or the country. And so will we see increased turnout over 2022? I think that remains to be questioned. I think we expect to see those gaps between older voters and younger voters.
Also, we won't have, unfortunately, at least in any immediate sense, an actual number for the college student voters. And I know we may talk about it more later, but we've relied on data for a number of years now, over a decade, for data on college student voting from the National Study of Learning Voting and Engagement, which is out of your nearby Tufts University, also in the Boston area. And right now that study is under investigation by the Department of Ed for potential alleged FERPA violations. So at the moment, as I've been telling other people, it's in a drawer, so we won't have access to that data. It's not something that we track generally. And Stephen, from your previous role, you may know this, it's not something we ask. We're not tracking-
Stephen Richer:
No, we didn't have, "Are you a college student or what's your degree attainment," for your registration form?
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Right, right.
Stephen Richer:
Just we could never tell people what different racial demographics were. Somebody could take our data and make a guess, was it centered around a college campus and how old were these people? But we didn't collect that information, yeah.
Yael Bromberg:
But we do know that voter turnout, it increases among young voters who are registered to vote. So when you compare the rates of registration with the turnout rate, you see remarked increases. So that to me tells me we need to make sure that we're... We're coming up on National Voter Registration Day in two weeks.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
A week from today, Tuesday.
Yael Bromberg:
A week from today. Oh, there you go. I thought it was in two, so good. Jen's tracking this. She probably has many events across the country taking place for National Voter Registration Day. But as we approach that, the cutoffs, which typically they range state by state, but they can be approximately 21 days or so before the election, we have to really emphasize the need for voter registration, because people are not going to come out if they're not registered to vote.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. So I have a question, just put this on the table, about the partisan difference between the youth vote. There's a strong impression out there that young people, especially young people on college campuses, tend to vote democratic. So how much do you think that that's true? And then if it is true, we'll get to the barriers in a moment, but then people could think, who are pretty cynical about the electoral process, could think that, "Well, politicians try to do things to make sure that their supporters can get out and try to discourage their opponents from turning out to vote." So why isn't the campus dynamics just an element of that? And we'll talk a lot in the details later on about what's going on there, but just to put that on the tape.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Archon, you're raising a set of great and important points. And you said at the top, the All In Campus Democracy Challenge is a nonpartisan entity. We're celebrating our 10th anniversary right now. We work with over a thousand colleges and campuses all across the US in all different parts of the country, urban campuses, rural, red states, blue states. We're pretty much everywhere at this point, which is great.
And one of the things that we really track is information about this youngest generation that is many of our current college students, so this Gen Z. And one of the things that's interesting is a lot of polls are showing us that more than 40%, and in fact, in many cases, nearly 50% of Gen Z doesn't identify strongly with either major political party. And so I think there's this sense that we have to look at of they're not particularly feeling like they are a member of one particular party or another, and they're not particularly feeling a sense of loyalty to one particular party or another, even if they are registered as a particular party.
And so, I think the majority of them, according to a lot of the data we've seen most recently through a pass-the-mic kind of survey between Circle and our pass-the-mic effort here at Civic Nation where All In is part of, really is showing us that 62% don't believe that the direction we're headed in as a country is the one that they think is the best way forward. And so, I think it's some of these sentiments that we need to be paying attention to.
And then more broadly, just like we can see other trends about urban voters versus rural voters and voters in specific states, there are different trends, but those trends are something we can look at after the fact and aren't always predictive of what's actually going to happen, and nor are the work of colleges and universities to try to get their voters to register or vote in a specific manner, but to help them understand that many times, for the first time they're eligible to vote as 18-year-olds, and to be able to navigate that process when you are already in that physical mail that's coming in as already previous voters is a really important role for them to play.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. So this goes into Maria [inaudible 00:13:24] in the chat asks about college student reticence due to cynical attitude towards politics as it's all the same thing kind of thing. Is that the reason you don't see more youth turnout? And then how do you think about that in tension with a bunch of the surveys that show that young people, they say that they're pretty fired up to vote? So which is it? Is it the cynicism or the fired up?
Yael Bromberg:
I think it's both. I mean these things, that's the paradox. They operate in a duality. I mean the Harvard Youth Poll also gives us some really helpful statistics coming from your neck of the woods. 26% of young Democrats and 30% of young Independents say they feel cynical. A lesser percentage of Republicans say, "We're paying attention, but we might not be participating."
So I think it's this combination of trying to get a party standard-bearer on whatever issue and on whatever level of government that motivates young people to turn out to vote and trying to overcome their cynicism about the direction of the country and the party duopoly. Young people are issuing traditional institutional labels across the board in politics and also elsewhere, including in the workplace. And so, they want an independent and new and fresh breath in the political structure and discourse, and they just see that we're a nation that's off the rails and they're not wrong. And I think that that is not a partisan perspective, it's a democracy perspective of where we are in the moment.
Stephen Richer:
How much of this is specific to this generation, this set of college students, and how much of this is just, this is always young people. I mean, they were at the forefronts of protesting Vietnam. They were at the forefronts of dissatisfaction with stagflation. Name your issue over the last 50 years. And even some of the partisan trends, yes, the 18 to 29-year-old vote has been more democratic leaning over the past 30 years than has the median American voter, but we've seen that consistently across the last few generations. So is this just is their phase and that will be changed or is there something materially different that's going on right now? So I can think of one on the partisan level, but I'll bring that up in a second, but I want to first let you fire at that.
Yael Bromberg:
Jen, you want to take the first crack?
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
I mean, I think Stephen, we always see pockets of activism show up on campuses because it's a place that people are really organized and able to organize and sometimes have the time to organize. I don't necessarily think that concerns about the lack of voting rights and concerns about the direction of our democracy are specifically tied only to young people or only to students on college campuses. I think the No Kings protests and a lot of other work is showing us some of the unhappiness. And I think much of that cuts across political lines. I think we're seeing unhappiness about the direction in a lot of different ways. Yael, I'm curious what else you would add to that?
Yael Bromberg:
Yeah, I mean, I think that 55 years ago when the 26th Amendment was ratified, it was done so specifically to bring young and fresh voices into the fold. President Nixon said at the ceremonial signing that the, I'm sure I'll butcher this now, but basically that the moral compass of the nation ebbs and flows and that young people offer the moral courage and wisdom to help to set it a course. And so that was 1971, and we see that today, we see it then. So I agree with you, Stephen. I think that this is an evergreen issue of what young people can offer the political system, and that's exactly why we expanded the suffrage to them.
Stephen Richer:
Okay. But what's not evergreen seemingly is the partisan gap between men and women. Is that a phenomenon that you track or is that something that you think is just sort of, it's a data point, but who knows what it'll be in four years?
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
I think you all gave a really great sense at the very beginning of the podcast. Stephen and Archon are talking to Stephen and Archon, not for Ashland or Harvard or the Kennedy School, right? Jen, as somebody who cares deeply about politics, is absolutely tracking that and finding it really interesting and finding it interesting to think about how does this come down to a sense of what masculinity looks like and all these other pieces? Jen, as the executive director of the All In Campus Democracy Challenge is not particularly concerned about that.
I am particularly concerned about looking at the amazing data we have had for the last decade from that [inaudible 00:18:24] study I gave you, which tells us, for instance, that on average, fewer first-year students are voting than seniors, and fewer 18 and 19-year-olds are voting than older students, that generally fewer STEM and business majors are voting than political science and social science majors. And what does that mean? And what does that mean for how messaging that campuses might be able to do to students helps?
It tells me that, again, that first-time voter is the hardest one to reach and to make sure they get that piece on. And I often tell my own story, and I'm aging myself a little bit here, but back when I was a college student, I was away at school about three hours away. I was busy trying to pass calculus as somebody who eventually majored in English, but thought she was bio pre-med because so did most of my peers. And I was trying to get along with my roommate when I was rowing crew and going to bed early and she was going to bed at the same time I was getting up.
And if my mom hadn't sent me my absentee ballot request form, I wouldn't have voted. Even though I had gone to the polls with my parents growing up, I knew it was a presidential election my freshman first semester. I knew who I wanted to vote for. I cared deeply. If she hadn't stepped in with that reminder, and frankly, my campus, which now participates in All In and does some great work, was not. I don't remember any messaging except from small tables from college Dems and college Republicans. I don't remember anything from an institutional lens. I wouldn't have done it. And did I actually cast my ballot? Yes, but because I had somebody reminding me of it in the right point of time. Because otherwise it would've been a week out and I would've been like, "It's too late to request my ballot. I don't have any way of getting home, and it was too late to change my registration to be local, even if I had thought that might be an option."
And so, I think some of this just-in-time messaging for young voters is part of the role that college campuses can play, and to not put too fine a pin on it, but what many of your listeners may not realize is actually since the late 1990s, the amended version of the Federal Higher Education Act requires almost all colleges and universities who get any kind of federal funding to make a good faith effort to register eligible students. And so that actually-
Stephen Richer:
Wow.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
... was taking place while I was a student. And then I would argue beyond that, that they have a moral and educational mission to do more than that, that many of their mission statements say they're preparing the future leaders of our democracy, they're preparing citizens to be informed and engaged members of their communities. So you start to look at that, the democracy root of why higher ed exists in this country has been there since, frankly, Harvard was founded.
Stephen Richer:
Can I pause you on that since I seem to be the only one who didn't know that? But as a condition for federal grants pursuant to anything, even if it's just sort of science research-
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
I mean, even if you are able to give federal works of your other grants to students. So even if you are a school that accepts federal grants and funding for students for financial aid, you are required. There are six states that are actually exempt from the law because when it was passed, those six states did not allow for same-day registration, and so they did not have to take some of those steps. But other than that, they've been required for quite a few years now.
Yael Bromberg:
But the problem is, right Jen, that that's a very squishy standard. What is a good faith effort?
Archon Fung:
Good faith effort, right.
Yael Bromberg:
Right? And we want to raise the bar as opposed to say, "Oh, this is the minimum amount that we do."
The minimum amount we do is do a university-wide blast by email to sync inboxes that nobody will open. We need to go even higher. And for example, in the Youth Voting Rights Act, which I helped to draft, which will be reintroduced in Congress this month, we actually try to identify universities to be tagged as recognized as public agencies, just like the motor vehicle commissions, so that there's a requirement to register individuals to come and vote. Anytime you interface with any public agency, the DMV, public benefits, anything, the government is required to give you an opportunity to register to vote, and the same should be said other institutions of higher education.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, interesting. So there's a bunch in the chat on different kinds of barriers to voting, and I guess maybe we could tackle this. One is, there's always been friction for young people on college campuses, Jen, like you mentioned, you could be away from home, you might be in a different state. These days, maybe you've never mailed anything before. You don't know how to do that, right?
Yael Bromberg:
You don't have a stamp. Yeah.
Archon Fung:
You don't have a stamp. What is a stamp? So there's ordinary frictions, or ones that have been around for a long time. And then there's a lot of talk of new activity at the court level, at the state level, North Carolina taking out polling stations from some campuses, federal barriers, maybe President Trump's initiative on the postal services general, but it might have particular effects on campuses, the SAVE Act, et cetera. So talk about both those, the more enduring frictions, but then also, do you think that there's a difference in the formal barriers that are appearing? And are those only in specific places? I mean, you hear about New Hampshire and North Carolina, but do you perceive it as more general?
Yael Bromberg:
It's across the country, and this is the thing about young people first of all, as a constitutionally recognized class of voters, which we don't usually appreciate them as that, pursuant to the 26th Amendment, and as an independent base of voters. So for example, you'll even see in blue states, because I know everyone wants to talk about red, blue, purple, you'll even see in blue states ways in which young people could have proven electoral mechanisms that could encourage engagement, but even there it's not passed. I'm thinking about on-campus voting locations, and I'm thinking about election day registration. And so, you'll see even a hesitation to engage voters in those key mechanisms in blue states.
And then you look at red states and you look at New Hampshire, a purple state, recent rollback on the availability of student voter identification as a form of ID going on decades and decades of efforts of youth voter suppression in New Hampshire. They used to require students to go and get an in-state driver license and an in-state motor vehicle registration in order to prove your permanent allegiance to the state. So every time something is passed and then the courts block it, something new is introduced.
You jump over to Montana, Montana rolled back the availability of election day registration. The court said, "No, that's youth voter discrimination."
And then they again passed a new law to mandate that students prove their permanent allegiance to a place. And once you start to go into that territory, it starts to look a lot like the Jim Crow questionnaires. Are you married? Do you live with your boyfriend or girlfriend on or off campus? Do you own a cat or a dog? These very bizarre... I'm not even making this up. These are these bizarre questions that are introduced into the electorate. But if you apply them to any other age cohort, you would say, "This is prima facie discrimination."
Older people who own multiple residents don't have to answer these questions or be subject to this type of inspection. It's really targeted at young people, and it does have a chilling effect. Prairie View, A&M University, they started to inspect the ability of, this is an HBCU, historically Black college and university, credible school. I've been there on multiple occasions. They launched an investigation into voter fraud against students for participating in the ballot.
And so, why I like to frame this within the 26th Amendment is because if you look at an individual student's failure to meet advanced voter registration requirement or their inability to figure out where to show up to vote in person because the polling locations change and maybe there's a district that's cut in the middle of campus or they moved from one year to another year and now they have a different polling location. If you look at an individual person, you said, "Okay, you're misinformed. You either didn't get your act together or the system didn't get their act together, but you as an individual are... It's not that big of a deal and this is on you."
But if you look at it within a systemic framework, which is what the 26th Amendment proffers, then you're looking at class-based voter discrimination, and it allows us to investigate all of the different factors and facets that young people have to overcome. So it allows a systemic lens of an issue. Oh, Jen.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
If you want to know more about what I was talking about, you should be reading her book.
Stephen Richer:
Mine's just... I can't grab it.
Yael Bromberg:
I'll bring it to you.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
But in all seriousness, there's a lot of great folks commenting in the chat and asking some great questions. And this book that's edited by Yael and her co-author, Jonathan Becker, who right now is the interim president of Bard College in New York State and was one of the campuses that sued their local polling folks because they refused to give them on-campus polling place despite New York law that requires them to allow the campus to have a polling place given the number of locally registered students. This book that came out, I think in December 2025-
Yael Bromberg:
Technically 2026, yeah.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
There you go. Well, maybe I got my copy early.
Yael Bromberg:
Yes, you did.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Youth Voting Rights and it's Civil Rights, the 26th Amendment, and the Fight for American Democracy on College Campuses, highly recommended.
Yael Bromberg:
Thank you.
Stephen Richer:
Let me push back ever so slightly. How much of this is just they're first-time voters? By definition, when you're 18 years old, you're voting for the first time, and when you're voting for the first time, you don't just already have everything set up. You're not already registered. You don't know the process. This is all new to you. So how much of this is just like, look, it doesn't matter whether you were 65 or whether you were 18, the first time that you are eligible to vote is just more challenging?
Archon Fung:
Yeah, there's friction.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
I mean, sure, Stephen, part of it is that. Part of it is that they're facing additional barriers simply as potential first-time voters. And part of it absolutely is not. We're having lots of different forms of ID count to be voter ID in states, many of which have the same or fewer of the pieces that we look for on ID. And you've got public institutions in states that their ID is part of the public government and we're not accepting them. They could change those ID frameworks. We have other states like North Carolina that they've had a long-term student ID process where every couple of years a campus has to submit what their ID looks like and then they get it approved or not approved.
It's a process. It leads to some confusion. Sometimes your ID works in the last election and not in this one. Or this campus... You're talking about Greensboro, North Carolina and the A&T ID may count and on other campuses, might not. So it can cause some confusion. But I think we can work to change those. And if they're public institutions and they're public ID, how are we allowing other forms of ID to count and we're disenfranchising this particular age group?
Yael Bromberg:
Texas, Tennessee. Texas and Tennessee, you can vote with a handgun license, but not a student ID. But in Tennessee, you can vote with the faculty ID issued from the same institution, but not from the student ID issued from that same institution. But Stephen, I think that your point is well taken that anytime you have to do something for the first time, if it's download an app, figure out a new whatever, I tend to think of technology, but that's just me. Every time you have to do something for the first time, you have to overcome some type of information barrier to get oriented on that.
But that's all the more reason for, especially institutions of higher education and the county boards of election and the county registrar, to step into that breach. Because once young people... Voting is habit-forming. Once you engage young people freshman year, for example, they will continue to engage. But the problem that I have is that when we individualize a systemic harm, especially for a first time person engaging in the system, that's when there starts to be a problem there.
And the changes of the polling locations is a really great example of that. Because of the mobility of the class, by the way, voters at large are increasingly mobile, but because of the mobility of the youth class, think about the college students that freshman to sophomore year, they're moving. Where do they register to vote to participate in the primary election that takes place in June?
Stephen Richer:
Yeah.
Yael Bromberg:
Right?
Stephen Richer:
Yeah.
Yael Bromberg:
So that's a systemic... What colleges are prioritizing the campus mailbox, providing proactive voter information, providing a... Some of them provide one general address that the students can list so that they can participate without having to worry about these year-to-year changes. No other voter experiences this.
Stephen Richer:
So we do want to get into some of the potential solutions, but I guess I'm hearing a bit of discriminatory intent, not just discriminatory effect. And I guess what would be the basis for that? Because it sounds like this happens in red states and blue states alike. Otherwise, the discriminatory effect is [inaudible 00:33:15] is more self-explanatory, which is like even our party wants to win and these people are all Democrats or something like that. But you're saying this is happening in blue states, too. So why would state legislators want to make it hard for college students to vote in a blue state? Yeah.
Yael Bromberg:
Perhaps it's their participation in a primary election or on the local level, right?
Archon Fung:
Yeah.
Yael Bromberg:
There's a range of reasons, but here's the thing, most people are not Jen, who's laser-focused on data and the trends. Most people, if you go into... I go into classrooms, I go into public audiences, most people don't know what the 26th Amendment is. Most recent voting rights amendment to be ratified, quickest amendment to be ratified in United States history, almost unanimously, because it reached a tipping point with cross-partisan, which is key, nearly unanimous support.
Because we don't recognize this constitutional right or constitutionally protected classification of voters, when something arises, even if it's prima facie intentional discrimination like you're mentioning, Stephen, like in Florida, Secretary of State issued a ban, you cannot put polling locations on campuses during the early voting period. There's a clear example of intentional... Texas, Texas also flirted with the idea of introducing that type of law. That's clear.
But because we don't anticipate, we don't consider this protected classification of voters, we also don't study the trends as much. So vote-by-mail ballots are rejected by outside rates when you study them on account of age. Same with provisional ballots. And then when you layer youth and race, you get astronomical rejection rates. And I don't like to highlight this, because this is something that can disillusion people from participation. But it's something that we actually have to collect the data and analyze, look at systemic ways to avoid this. And again, these are determining the results of elections. They're election outcome determinative.
Stephen Richer:
So as academics say, more research is needed.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. Before we move to solutions, I did want to talk a little bit about whether you guys feel like there's a chilling effect for this kind of work on campuses now? And so, you have state law, you have federal activity. Those are really important to understand. Another thing that's important to understand, by and large, are many public and private campuses really like, "Okay, well, we understand that there's these legal changes, but we really want our students to vote, so let's do that. Let's dive into that enterprise." Or do you feel like it's the case that in the wake of the federal legislation and the attack on higher ed, that there's a reticence to encourage this kind of activity because it's just another way to stick your head up that you might get donked?
And I did want to show this figure. So I was at the American Political Science Association meetings this weekend and some people were talking about academic freedom around the world. And so I pulled some VDEM data. This is the data of comparing all sorts of democracy indicators for every country in the world over a long period of time. And this is what the VDEM data from just March show about academic freedom in the US, which I was stunned by. So the black line is the US. It's been the highest in the world if you could understand [inaudible 00:37:16]
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Wow.
Archon Fung:
... back to 1900, right? And then it actually starts dropping during the Biden years, and then it goes off a real cliff in the last year or so. So this is about academic freedom. This is not about voting on campus, but it really stands out to me and says, "Well, when I suspect that my colleagues or students are reluctant to say things, maybe it's not all imagination or do things."
So I wanted to ask about the chilling effect, whether you thought there was one, and then also it's an opportunity to talk about the NSALT data, which Jen, I know you use a lot. We used a lot in Harvard Votes Challenge because I think that was kind of a domino, at least for me, in thinking about the chilling effect on voting efforts.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Yeah, Archon, I think you're asking some really important questions. I was at the same conference you were at last week and certainly heard from some of the political scientists on campuses that are paying attention to the work that their campus is doing either specifically or tangentially as members of that campus. I certainly think there are and have been some chilling effects on what campuses are doing at the institutional level. I certainly don't want to call anyone out by name or anything like that.
I do, however, think that one of the pluses of the work that All In and groups like the Andrew Goodman Foundation, the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition and others have been doing over the last decade has helped to institutionalize some of this work more broadly. So I think we're still seeing different folks on campus do a lot of the work both because there's some parts they realize are required. I think we are seeing groups like Harvard Votes and other nonpartisan student groups really picking up the mantle and doing a lot of that work. I think part of it is, some of that nonpartisan messaging has been there are just ways to do some of that.
So, do I think it's having a chilling effect directly on students? No. Do I think most students are aware of that? No. Am I hopeful that we can admit that there's frankly an intentional chilling effect, not only with the investigation of unsolved, but a prohibition of using federal work study dollars in a Dear Colleague Letter from being used to pay for nonpartisan student voter registration? Do we feel like there are other things that have been pulled in terms of resources that were up on the Department of Education's website that aren't? There are some clear actions we can look to.
On the other hand, that can't change the fact that the higher ed staff has this good faith requirement. It doesn't change the very mission driven piece of that. We're seeing presidents from across 800 or so campuses that All In tracks that have signed our pledge to have all students be given the information they need to be able to register and cast a ballot. So I think we're seeing actions taken, but I think we're also seeing more places where hands are being tied in different ways.
Stephen Richer:
So I'll confess some sympathy with the public funding component of that. Just because in my office where we did register voters, the voters came to us, and we were always a little reticent about voter registration drives, affirmative voter registration drives as a government taxpayer funded entity just because we felt like there is implicit bias, there is inherent bias. If I told my team to go out into the field, they'd probably go where they are most comfortable and that probably has some bias baked into it. And then all of a sudden you're using public dollars for potentially a stacked in some manner, not intentionally so, but a stacked voter registration drive. So I guess I have some level of patience for that. It sounds like you have less for it potentially.
But I do want to, just given where we are in the conversation, I do want to turn to solutions. So a lot of people have asked in the chats-
Archon Fung:
[inaudible 00:41:23].
Stephen Richer:
... "What are you guys doing about it? What's successful? Has the expansion of vote by mail, has the expansion of technology, has the expansion of groups like yours, Jen, increased over the last 20 years the number of students who are participating in elections and young people voting? And if so, and you had another hundred million dollars to invest, where would you put it? What's good return?"
Archon Fung:
Yeah, great.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Great questions. I think there are a handful of things we know work. We know that understanding who the students are on a given campus and helping make sure the messaging is congruent with that is really helpful. So there's an absolute difference between what messaging you're going to give to Harvard students who may choose to vote in Massachusetts or many of whom may choose to vote by mail and absentee ballots in states all across the country. And so how do you help share that? I live just outside of DC and Maryland and there are many campuses in the District of Columbia. Almost none of their students are voting in DC where they don't get to vote for a senator. And so, most of them are voting by mail, again, across the country.
We do see that community colleges on average lag about 10 percentage points behind their four-year peers, which is really interesting because those students are often from those communities and stay in those communities at even higher rates. So we have done a lot of work in the past handful of years to really focus efforts and funding for community colleges. Part of that is often their students are busy with even more things, have full-time jobs, have children-
Archon Fung:
They're working. Yeah.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
They're working. But that means the messaging becomes even more important, so helping campuses be able to get some of that messaging. Partly it's also that those of us who are on a campus, we've voted potentially for a really long time in that place, and so we get all the messaging, and we don't need to pay attention to what's changing. And so, part of All In's job is to get that information into the hands and to say, "Hey, are you making sure your students who are from New Hampshire know that there's this new law that passed?"
So we send all sorts of information both directly to students who use our nonpartisan tool at allintovote.org. We also send things to campuses so that they can share it. We send things to student groups like Harvard Votes so they can share information about voting in different states. We try to send alerts when there are changes in laws. And we send a lot of information about what we know works. So the earlier you can get messaging to students as they either register for classes or come during orientation, the fact that you give them the options that they can vote at home, whatever that permanent home is or at campus, what those processes are and you're getting that just-in-time messaging.
And campuses, frankly, for this kind of thing are very much trusted messengers. We also rely a lot on peers, so we do a lot of work to help students have that messaging. So it's like one thing to get students registered, which the institution has the real responsibility for, and then it's having peers be able to talk to each other and say, "Hey, we care about the environment." Or, "We care about the fact that it costs a lot to go to school. And who makes those decisions, where does it show up on the ballot? How do we understand how to do that?"
Stephen Richer:
Okay, you all, in my magnificence, I give you a hundred million dollars to commit to this cause as well [inaudible 00:44:46]
Yael Bromberg:
I would probably start a youth voting rights legal defense and education fund. Every other protected class of voters has one. Youth voters specifically don't. But I also think that we need to standardize on-campus polling locations. You have campuses with 50,000 voters, 10,000, 2,000. Why would we not put an on-campus polling location, especially when the campus has all of the resources available that could actually add to the resource pool for the county as opposed to subtract from it?
And Jen mentioned the Bard litigation. I was actually privileged to be counsel on those cases to secure an on-campus polling location there. And I also studied the impact of it, the availability of an on-campus polling location across college campuses. So I found a correlation, if you have a polling place on campus on election day, increases or correlates with an increase in voting rate of 5.3 percentage points. If you have it during the early voting period, 5.9. If you have it for both, this is impressive, 7.4. That's on track with same-day registration. And of course, even I have to say the Youth Voting Rights Act. We're not going to pass it today. We're not going to pass it tomorrow, but it gives us something that in 50 years it's what we should be working towards.
Stephen Richer:
Can you give us the elevator pitch for the Youth Voting Rights Act, like what it comprises?
Yael Bromberg:
I'd love to. It's the most comprehensive proposed legislation to enforce and uphold the promise of the 26th Amendment pursuant to its Section 2, Congress may act or enforce this... Just like the Voting Rights Act. And so what it would do, there's multiple prongs of it, but what it would do it would address all of the issues that we've talked about today. To the extent that proof of voter identification is required, allow for student voter ID to include public colleges and universities as covered under the National Voter Registration Act so that they're mandatory to provide voter registration opportunities with a generous waiver and opt-out if that just doesn't work for them for one reason or another, specifically with regard to a mandate for on-campus polling locations.
Study the data, like what I was talking about before, the rejections of VBMs, vote by mail and provisional ballots, based on youth and based on youth plus race. Provide generous grant and support for county clerks and election administrators to engage young people. This should be peer-to-peer. They don't want to hear from me. They don't want to hear from any of us, frankly. They want to hear from each other. And so, we want to encourage grants to support... And it's very much anchored on the non-partisan aspect, non-partisan, peer-to-peer youth voter engagement. So the Youth Voting Rights Act has multiple prongs and bullets. Like I said, it's the most comprehensive proposed legislation, but that's essentially what it's going towards.
Stephen Richer:
Yeah, that's great. Archon, you have two kids who are in this demographic.
Archon Fung:
Yeah.
Stephen Richer:
What was their voter registration? Did they register? How did they come across that?
Archon Fung:
Well, my older one has been in Massachusetts the whole time, so it's been pretty straightforward, and our polling place is basically a block away.
Stephen Richer:
Did you take him or did he do something on campus?
Archon Fung:
No, I don't think he did anything on campus. He registered in the mail. And then Zach, that's a good point, he's down at Tulane. So he's got to either vote by mail here or register in Louisiana.
Stephen Richer:
Did he vote in the primary?
Archon Fung:
No, I don't think... I seriously doubt he voted in the primary.
Yael Bromberg:
Louisiana, I mean, Louisiana is one of... There's actually potentially a case that's heading to the US Supreme Court now on the 26th Amendment. The first one since 55 years, since 1979 when the first case went up. And it has to do with states like Louisiana, which require voters under the age of 60 or 65 to offer a narrow list of excuses, but voters over the age of 65 don't have to offer an excuse at all. And it's not just offer excuses, it's offer excuses plus proof in order to vote by mail.
Archon Fung:
To vote vote by mail, yeah.
Yael Bromberg:
Yeah. And so the Fifth and Seventh Circuits went against it. They actually went out of the way to say that, "The 26th Amendment does not encompass the right to vote by mail, and that because vote by mail was not prolific in 1971 when it was ratified, therefore it's not a part of the right to vote jurisprudence."
The Fourth Circuit, thankfully, only two or three weeks ago, came out unanimously in a decision to say, "Actually, this is obviously a violation of the 26th Amendment." So now we have a Circuit Court split on the question, and it's possible that it'll go up to the Supreme Court for review.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Archon, as you're talking to your young voters in your house or in your family, even if they're not in your house, one of the other things we've been tracking and messaging to campuses is the issue around legally repeatable signatures, which I think Stephen you might have made a joke about, "Do young people know how to find stamps and where to get stamps," earlier?
One of the things we're finding is they have not learned... I have a daughter who's 13. They've not learned cursive, they have not learned... And even beyond that, so it's not just [inaudible 00:50:37], they have not learned to create a signature that they can repeat in general. And so, we are seeing that the number of vote-by-mail ballots that are being refused and not accepted because they do not match the signature on file and the signature on file... And we're seeing it across other age groups, but we're seeing it mostly among young people. I think some of us that are older are getting lazy too as we do the little squiggle on the screen.
Stephen Richer:
So from my office, it was the first time somebody voted, we had fewer comparator signatures in our file because each time we would get a mail ballot packet, we would take an image of that signature and we would add it to our file. And so, when we had a repository that was 20 plus signatures long, we could see if it had characteristics of different ones, we could even trace a little bit of an evolution. But for a lot of our first time voters, our only comparison signature was the thing that they did at the voter's vehicle division, which was often on that touch-pad. And then, yes, made even worse if apparently they don't even know that a signature is something that mirrors their previous signatures, which I didn't know was something that we needed to educate the next generation in.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
There was actually a piece of legislation introduced over the winter in the state of Washington, because the state of Washington is predominantly vote by mail, that would actually require that their required high school civics class teach about legally repeatable signatures, not only in terms of voting, but in terms of understanding that you're creating a legal precedent and where that would matter. And it definitely is something we're not teaching. And as I talk to even other adults who care deeply about voting, it's something that a lot of folks are not tracking.
Archon Fung:
Right. From a bigger vantage, the conversation just makes me think how much of a patchwork this whole thing is?
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Yes.
Archon Fung:
So probably most of our folks, viewers and listeners know that there isn't... And Yael certainly knows this very well, there is no affirmative right to vote in the United States. There's a right not to be discriminated against in your right to vote, but there's no affirmative right to vote. And so, it's pretty weak and it gets patchworky. And you have to teach young people who've never had to sign their name to anything.
Stephen Richer:
I think I'll let Yael jump in here, but I think she's going to say that there has been constitutional law, even if it is not explicit in the constitution. Yael, is that right?
Yael Bromberg:
Yes. And the legislative history of the 26th Amendment talks about not an anti-discrimination lens when it comes to youth voter participation. It's very interesting. It talks about affirmative engagement and affirmative political participation on account of the youth. That's very different. And this anti-discrimination lens is more of a, why is that the premise of the analysis of a constitutional violation?
And I have to respond to what Stephen offered earlier. I'm curious about his response. If we cannot rely on public agencies to do what the government requires of voter registration, then we are presuming that the burden is on presumably nonpartisan, but also the political parties, voter registration. And you all know your colleague, Miles Rappaport and several other colleagues are advancing a theory of 100% voting, which essentially says that voting must be mandatory similar to jury duty and that we're not going to penalize voting. You're not going to get criminally liable if you don't participate, but what are the psychological tweaks that we can engage in to encourage 100% voting rates?
And there's some interesting studies. It's the same way with automatic voter registration. Once you switch an opportunity at the DMV to vote out as opposed to vote in, it's all psychological. But I think my question still goes. I think that this is the government's business. If the government is saying everyone has to engage in voter registration in order to participate in the system, I'm not talking about Maricopa County specifically, but just at large, right? If the government is saying this is the mandate... Because in Europe, they don't require voter registration in Europe. This is something that we require of Americans to participate in the system, and we're not talking about voter fraud in Europe either. So I think that there are just different ways.
And the reason that young people are upset about the institutional limitations of democracy today is because we suffer from a crisis of vision. Why are we focused on a two-party duopoly where the results are largely made in a primary election and the congressional districts are not competitive, right?
Stephen Richer:
Well, that's certainly an evergreen topic, and I think that one that a lot of our listeners would have a lot of sympathy for, whether or not that can be translated into a changed voting system, obviously something that's very much in play with different voter choice movements throughout the United States. 2024 was not a great year for those types of alternative voting methods things, but I do think that that's certainly part of the conversation.
In response to your very fair provocation, yes, there's always some level of inherent discrimination just even where the government office is located, I suppose. So we always thought of it as incoming rather than outgoing. And then we thought, "Well, we should make incoming as easy as possible and as seamless as possible."
And so, one of the things that, I got to plug Arizona here, one of the things that Arizona did invent was online voter registration. And so, that was people going to it in a way that had fewer barriers. Another thing is yes, we have ever since [inaudible 00:56:43] every state, since the Help America Vote Act, most people are registering through the motor vehicle division, which they go to for obvious sort of more, I guess, tangible purposes than voting. But I do think that that's a fun conversation that maybe I'll think about some more and write you an email. But I know we're getting a little late on time here, so Archon, any final questions?
Archon Fung:
I thought this was a fantastic conversation. I'm pretty familiar with many years of involvement in Harvard Votes Challenge with some of the campus work for sure. And Yael, we haven't had the opportunity to engage in this really striking perspective of thinking about the youth vote as not just flipping the switch and allowing everybody who's 18 to vote, but thinking about the youth vote as a class and whether there's fair opportunity there or not, and developing a pattern criticism and investigation. So it was a really rich discussion. And thank you guys for all of your work, and you'll be very, very busy, I realize, up until November, and thanks for making the time.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Archon, I want to make sure... A couple of folks in the chat had asked, we're only mostly talking about college students today. Obviously, when we think about youth as a class, it's much beyond that. And I want to be clear, there are a number of groups that All In works hand in hand with, including new voters, which was actually started by a Harvard grad, including the Civic Center. So there are a number of groups that are working to make sure that young people as they graduate high school are given the information they need. There are a number of other groups like the League of Women Voters and other groups on the ground that are helping all voters and really look at non-college youth.
So I do want to say that while we're certainly representing in large part of the college voice here today, partly because there are clear institutions who can have concrete messaging, that this is also a bigger problem and there are groups working to stitch together answers.
And I also just want to say that as we work with college campuses to get on campus polling sites and other kinds of things, they're not just helping those college students. Many of those polling sites are able to serve a broader community in a way that has modern and accessible facilities and has [inaudible 00:59:11] specifically.
And also that a lot of it is having some impact on local high schools and local schools. Many of these are students who are studying to be teachers, they're learning some of these processes. So there are definitely, as institutions of higher education are often anchor institutions in their communities, there are often broader pieces. A lot of voter registration work that they're doing is happening at public events, whether it's sporting events or other pieces, and certainly are some of the messengers more largely in their communities.
Stephen Richer:
Well, it's a topic that is of course near and dear to our hearts being here on a university on a campus. So we really appreciate you both making time for us today. Jen and Yael are on social media. You can follow them. Their names are pretty easy to search up and follow on social media, as are some of the projects and organizations that they are affiliated with. So we encourage you to do that, as well as we put the link to the book that we showed during the program. Thank you as always, in addition to our crew, to Ralph, to Colette, to Courtney, and to Evelyn. And Archon, any final parting words of wisdom?
Archon Fung:
Huge thank you to Yael and Jen, and thanks for everybody for joining us this afternoon.
Stephen Richer:
All right. See you next Tuesday.
Yael Bromberg:
Thank you all. It's honored to join you.
Jen Domagal-Goldman:
Thanks so much. So great.
Archon Fung:
Thank you.
Voiceover:
Thank you for listening to Terms of Engagement. Email us your questions, suggestions, or thoughts for future episodes. You can find an email address in the show notes below. See you next time.