The Insights
Through informational interviews with over 20 campuses, multiple on-site observations, and in-depth case studies, we’ve put together a series of insights that can help your campus reach 100% student voter participation. We’ve broken down the insights into three levels of implementation: Integration, Execution, Institutionalization.
Check out our January-July 2019 Insight Brief for further reading about how to reach full student voter participation through orientation.
Integrate
Think about all of the processes that every student goes through— whether it’s orientation, a mandatory class, class registration, or something else. Now imagine what would happen if democratic engagement was integrated into that process. Integration is about implementing high quality democratic engagement processes into the existing systems that reach every student.
Tech Integration
Civic technology, such as Democracy Works’ TurboVote platform, comes up over and over again as a way for campuses to enact campus-wide efforts for full registration, either online through systems like class registration, or offline with computers or tablets at events. Most of these campuses are not yet seeing full completion rates, but it’s important that we find ways to marry innovative civic technology with the tactics that can lead to those standards.
Institutional Structures
Different orientation and new student programs are run by different campus departments and divisions. For example, at some institutions a “welcome week” is sometimes run by the division of student affairs while “orientation” is run by the campus registrar, traditionally housed in academic affairs. This allows for multiple routes in which to reach everyone, but the diffusion of responsibility leaves no one in charge.
The Power of Focus
Having a 3-5 minute conversation around democratic engagement with every student in which voter registration is offered is the gold start to full student voter participation. There’s already existing opportunities to gain this focus on every campus, whether it’s orientation, welcome week, parking pass pickup, academic advising, or universal classes.
Piloting Your Program
For orientation integration, winter orientation and other off-peak endeavors for new and transfer students entering the institution are opportunities to try out a new program, build relationships with orientation personnel and departments, and work out kinks in the program’s design. For classroom integration, you can test out your process at any time during the year in a smaller number of classrooms.
Execute
Execution is all about making the work happen. This includes the actual process of registering students and assisting with absentee ballot request forms when applicable, training students and staff, utilizing civic technology, and making sure that student voters are being supported.
Efficient and Effective Voter Registration
The voter registration process requires time and precision to be effective, but most processes that reach all students often have time restraints that result in lower quality execution. Having a well trained, supported team is essential in this, along with a strong, organized process for execution.
Failure Rate Awareness
Campuses are not aware of how many submitted forms are not accepted by local election officials. They are also only vaguely aware of the failure rate with the use of online voter registration platforms, but specific data about which students do not make it onto the rolls is generally unavailable. We need to intentionally ensure that students successfully complete the voter registration process with no failures.
Registering On-Campus vs. Prior Address
There is strong evidence that students display a preference to register at the address they have used prior to moving to attend the institution and are more likely to register if that option is given. There is also evidence, however, that students who develop a place-based identity around the community where they attend school actually turnout to vote at higher rates than students who stay registered at prior addresses and spend time and energy having to navigate absentee voting rules and deadlines. It’s important that we support students in making this decision.
Pre-Work
Some campuses ask students to complete pre-work before arriving to campus at the start of a new semester. Students can be asked for basic information on whether they are already registered, what address they want to register at, and what questions they have about engaging in upcoming elections. With this information, campuses can do a much more targeted and personalized approach to meet the needs of each student. Most voter registration activities campuses are doing now are not as individualized.
Institutionalize
Institutionalizing democratic engagement on your campus includes making an institutional commitment to full student voter participation, creating cross-campus coalitions, establishing a meaningful non-partisan culture around voting that includes non-eligible students, and making sure student leaders are supported in your efforts.
Overcoming Silos
Campuses without a separately staffed office, department, or center for civic engagement tend to add civic engagement to the portfolio of a staff person, which limits the institution’s ability to spread efforts inter-departmentally and all across campus. While these leaders are great resources for others vested in civic engagement work, it often prevents this work from becoming institutionalized. Additionally, the scale of large campuses makes any campus-wide effort extraordinarily hard. Numerous interviewees brought up the literal physical distance between them and other stakeholders on their campuses.
Ad Hoc Funding Structures
Campus vote coalitions tend to cobble together funding from different sources and figure out what is possible within those constraints. A full institution-wide effort requires a more holistic approach with an ongoing budget outlining the total need and different funding sources to support it. Most voter engagement coalitions appear to lack the infrastructure or capacity for that type of ongoing planning.
Student Leadership
Trained student leaders are great assets and they have a lot of information both for individual campuses and student voting efforts overall. Making sure they are connected to opportunities to grow in leadership both with campus vote coalitions and organizations supporting student voting nationally is hugely valuable.
Political Context
Voter engagement efforts tend to be harder to do at public institutions in states where local political conditions are less welcoming to student voters, even if they’re non-partisan. These barriers include administrative reluctance to engage, a culture of avoiding politics on campuses, and restrictive voting laws. This results in leaders at the institutions facing the largest challenges receiving least institutional support.
Senior Leadership and Support
A lot of voter engagement champions are junior staffers in civic engagement roles without complete knowledge or capital to fully move institution-wide initiatives forward. Finding ways to pair champions with leaders who have institution-wide experience and utilizing the expertise of colleagues at other institutions is important to be set up for success.
Including Non-Eligible Students
Efforts that hyper-focus on voter registration may yield high participation results, but can often result in isolating non-eligible students and disregarding other civic engagement opportunities. Through engaging students on issues that matter to them, uplifting other civic and democratic engagement opportunities, and encouraging dialogue on campus, there’s many ways to include all students in this work.