WashingtonAlarmed that young people are increasingly proving to be a major force for Democrats at the polls, Republican lawmakers in several states have been trying to enact new barriers to college students voting.
In Idaho, Republicans used their monopoly power this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.
But so far this year, Idaho’s new law is one of the few successes for Republicans targeting young voters.
Attempts to block out-of-state students from voting in their campus cities or to reverse teen pre-registration have failed in New Hampshire and Virginia. Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation closed early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places appears to have an uncertain future.
“When these ideas are first raised, people are horrified,” said Chad Dunn, co-founder and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. But he cautioned that lawmakers who sponsor such bills tend to introduce them over and over again.
“Then six, eight, 10 years later, these terrible ideas become law,” he said.
In recent cycles, turnout has increased among young voters, who were excited about issues like abortion, climate change and the Trump presidency.
They voted in increasing numbers during the midterm elections last year in Kansas and Michigan, which had referendums on abortion. And college students, who had long paid scant attention to elections, emerged as a crucial voting bloc in the 2018 midterm elections.
But even with such achievements, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights program, said there was still progress to be made.
“Their share is still far superior to their older counterparts,” Morales-Doyle said.
Now, with the 2024 presidential election underway, the battle for young voters has loomed larger.
Between the 2018 and 2022 elections in Idaho, registration increased 66 percent among voters ages 18 and 19, the largest increase in the nation, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Engagement and Learning. The nonpartisan research organization, based at Tufts University, focuses on youth civic engagement.
Of the 17 states that generally require voter ID, Idaho will join Texas and only four others (North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee) that do not accept any student ID, according to Voting Rights Lab, a group that track legislation.
Arizona and Wisconsin have rigid rules about student IDs that colleges and universities have had trouble complying with, though some Wisconsin schools have had success.
