A Detour for Democracy

On January 12, 2026, the North Carolina State Board of Elections voted 3–2, with its Republican majority prevailing along party lines, to reject requests for a voting site on the campus of North Carolina A&T State University, the nation’s largest historically Black university. As a result, more than fifteen thousand students had to leave campus—find a ride, carve out time, navigate unfamiliar precincts—to vote early in the primary elections. Recent election cycles have seen a wave of similar instances of state and local officials acting to eliminate or restrict on-campus polling sites, often citing concerns about administrative burden and costs. Critics argue that the effect—and in some cases the intent—is to limit turnout among college students. 

The consequences of removing or restricting polling sites on campuses are measurable and significant. My research, which is based on data associated with the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (a Tufts University nonpartisan research initiative), shows that access to on-campus polling sites boosts student voting. Turnout rises by 5.3 percentage points when Election Day voting is available on campus, 5.9 points when early voting is available, and 7.39 points when students have both. 

In general, research studies have shown that proximity to polling locations increases participation, especially for young voters with limited transportation or time. Those acting to restrict on-campus voting often cite administrative concerns related to costs and logistics, but political actors are making a more strategic calculation: When campuses lose polling sites, fewer students vote. In close elections, those disenfranchised voters can shape the outcome.

More than fifty years ago, college students were at the forefront of expanding their access to voting. Youth leaders built a robust coalition of cross-partisan groups to do the seemingly impossible: secure the ratification of a constitutional amendment extending the franchise to adults eighteen years and older. The resulting Twenty-Sixth Amendment, ratified on July 1, 1971, both lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen and prohibited the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of age (such as requiring extra documentation or limiting access to polling places for younger voters).  

During the ratification process, Congress and the states explicitly stated the need to establish on-campus polling sites. “Forcing young voters to undertake special burdens” such as “traveling to one centralized location in each city . . . in order to exercise their right to vote might well serve to dissuade them from participating in the election,” explained the Senate report accompanying the amendment ratification. The legislative record goes further: “The travel to a centralized voting place might be impossible for many young people. Indeed, to force younger voters to go to greater pains in order to exercise their right to vote is at least inconsistent with the purpose of the Voting Rights Act, which sought to encourage greater political participation on the part of the young; such segregation might even amount to a denial of their 14th Amendment right to equal protection of the laws in the exercise of the franchise.”

Today, we may be tempted to dismiss student voters as a transient population and ask: Why should they vote on campus at all? Although an individual student may live in a college community for only four or five years (some remain longer), the population of student voters itself is constant. And its need for elected representation—at the local, state, and federal levels—remains just as steady, whether the issue is housing, health care, student debt, or access to affordable higher education.

In contemplating this question, the Supreme Court in 1979 upheld students’ right to vote on campus. The court observed that the act of singling out voters on account of their age is itself anathema to the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, as an abridgment of their right to vote. Accordingly, students may choose to register to vote from their campus address or a parent’s or a prior address to which they intend to return. Even for students attending college in their home state, an on-campus polling site can spare them a trip to vote in person elsewhere and help them avoid navigating often complex vote-by-mail procedures.

The bipartisan process that led to the ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment focused on the protection of democracy. In 1971, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a leading figure in the resurgence of modern conservatism, championed its passage, arguing that young people’s idealism was not a liability but a national asset: “We need more citizens who are concerned enough to pose high social and moral goals for the nation.” 

Despite that long tradition, the fight to protect student voting rights and access to on-campus polling sites continues today. In 2018 a federal judge in Florida upheld Twenty-Sixth Amendment rights, finding that the state’s ban on on-campus polling sites during early voting “lopsidedly impacts Florida’s youngest voters, creating a secondary class of voters . . . from even seeking early voting sites in dense, centralized locations where they work, study, and in many cases, live.” As a result, twelve Florida campuses secured early-voting sites in the three months between the court’s decision and the 2018 midterms. Approximately sixty thousand people voted at these sites before Election Day. These on-campus polling sites also boosted voter turnout among eligible voters who did not vote in the 2016 elections. 

Taken together, both history and these more recent events underscore that safeguarding on-campus polling sites is not peripheral to democracy but part of defending the franchise for a rising generation of voters.

Colleges and universities can take concrete steps to ensure students can vote on campus and, more broadly, to increase student voting rates:

• Work with state and local election officials to establish and maintain on-campus polling locations during both early voting and Election Day, treating the sites as core civic infrastructure rather than optional services.
• Streamline voter registration by integrating it into orientation and course enrollment, while also providing clear, state-specific guidance on residency and ID requirements. 
• Ensure that student identification cards conform with state-specific requirements in states where such ID is a permitted form of voter identification.
• Offer state-specific instructions for students who intend to vote by mail, including information about important deadlines.
• Reduce logistical barriers on Election Day by offering shuttle transportation to polling sites when needed, extending library or student center hours during voting periods, and either adopting flexible class attendance policies or designating Election Day as a holiday so students are not penalized for voting. 
• Invest in sustained, nonpartisan voter education efforts—through faculty partnerships, student organizations, and campus communications—that normalize voting as part of the college experience and connect it to the broader aims of liberal education and democratic participation.

As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding and the 55th anniversary of the ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, institutions of higher education must support student voting with actions as well as words. Studies show that voting is habit forming and that participating at an early age helps establish a lifelong commitment to democratic participation. The upcoming midterm and presidential election cycles will test whether colleges and universities are willing to take concrete steps to protect student voting rights at a time when those rights—and the democratic system they sustain—are facing increasing threats.