How Colleges Can (and Can’t) Support 2020 Campaign-Related Activities

American Council on Education:

As the issue brief points out, colleges and universities have long supported student voter participation efforts such as the Your Vote, Your Voice initiative, a national campus voter registration project coordinated by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Various other nonpartisan initiatives encourage institutions and their constituencies to help make student voting easier. For instance, the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge is a national awards program recognizing colleges and universities for their commitment to increasing student voting rates.

Campus efforts can be as varied as the schools themselves. Stanford University's campus-wide campaign StanfordVotes registered more students to vote via the digital platform TurboVote in the beginning of 2020 than any other campus initiative in the country. Mesa Community College's voter education website has helped the school to be tapped as a “Voter Friendly Campus" by the Campus Vote Project. The University of Richmond's athletics department created the Spiders Vote Initiative to encourage voter registration, education, and participation among the school's student-athletes, coaches, and staff.

As the brief emphasizes, colleges and universities should take care to ensure that the voting resources offered to their students are nonpartisan and that their communications with students are offered and received that way.

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