Voting In College: Students Get Creative To Rally Young Voters To The Polls

YR Media, Claire Hyman:

A dearth of typical engagement methods is likely to affect the number of students who register to vote, said Adam Gismondi, the director of impact at the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education. But ultimately turnout will reflect how savvy the organizers can be in a socially-distanced world, he said.

“If this pandemic was happening in the year 2000, the look of voter participation on college campuses would be very different, but right now there are venues for participation,” Gismondi said. “I’m hopeful we’ll see some new methods for reaching students, and that this isn’t a catastrophe for students in terms of college participation.”

Olivia Chapman is a senior at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. After researching student voter enfranchisement for a project last year, she became an advocate. This year, Chapman is a democracy fellow at the Campus Vote Project, and she’s using social media to encourage her peers to vote.

She organized Zoom watch parties for the presidential debates and created an Instagram campaign that illustrated the history of voter suppression.

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