It’s Never Been Easier To Ask Every Student To Vote

Last month, Ask Every Student, a joint-initiative led by the Fair Elections Center’s Campus Vote Project, the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, and NASPA, launched the newest iteration of their Toolkit, a groundbreaking set of nonpartisan strategies, tools, and tactics tailored to help institutions of all types and sizes achieve 100% voter registration rates.

The Toolkit was developed using a human-centered design process in collaboration with the Ask Every Student Codesigner Cohort, a diverse and deliberately selected group of leaders from 20 campuses throughout the US. This version is the second iteration of the resource to date following its initial release in 2020 and offers a more innovative, comprehensive, and campus-driven set of content.

The Ask Every Student Toolkit features resources designed to support the implementation of four distinct nonpartisan voter engagement strategies intended to help institutions ask every student to register to vote:

• Academic Integration: Working with faculty to integrate civic engagement into the classroom, prepare students to participate in elections, and incorporate voter registration into the course registration process.

• Student Life Integration: Incorporating voter registration into processes like orientation, welcome week, bus/parking pass pick up, and other programming that touches students’ day-to-day lives.

• Student Leadership Opportunities: Recruiting and training students to be leaders and ambassadors of campus voting initiatives, including federal work study positions, fellowship programs, and incentivized volunteer ambassadorships.

• Institutional Partnerships: Developing strategic institutional partnerships with offices like the registrar, gaining commitment from senior leadership, and developing campus coalitions to advance equity.

Additionally, the Toolkit also has a Human-Centered Design section dedicated to helping users identify the strategies and tactics that best meet the needs of their specific student and faculty populations, with the end goal of integrating meaningful, inclusive democratic engagement and voter registration processes into every aspect of campus culture. The Engagement Resources section includes campus and partner created resources to engage students in every step of the democratic process, including other civic action activities, connecting voting to different majors, and transforming voter registration into voter turnout.

The mission of asking every student is now more accessible than ever before, thanks to the collaboration of the amazing local leaders on college campuses across the country!