Under pressure from the youth voting movement, some members of Congress and other public figures sought in the 1940s to lower the U.S. voting age from 21 to 18, employing a slogan that would get much use over the next 25 years: “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” Although my home state of Georgia became the first (in 1943) to lower the voting age to 18 for local elections, on the national level the reformers couldn’t get any traction despite the millions of under 21s who were drafted to fight in World War II and the 10s of 1,000s in that age group who were killed in combat. The Korean conflict spurred another unsuccessful attempt to lower the voting age.
As ever more troops were sent to Vietnam beginning in the early 1960s, the effort to tie the draft to the voting age began anew, initially without success. However, as the flow of U.S. personnel grew from a few hundred special forces “advisors” into a deployment of half-a-million troops at a time, with a couple of hundred reportedly killed each week and no end in sight, that World War II slogan seemed as appropriate as ever. (Ultimately, 44% of U.S. fatalities in Vietnam were 18-20 when they died, more than 25,000.) That war, and the opposition to it, generated enough political pressure to get the 26th Amendment passed and ratified in record time in 1971, immediately lowering the national voting age everywhere to 18.
Immediately, state and local authorities began trying various means to suppress an important slice of voters in that age demographic: college students. They‘ve tried to keep students from registering in college towns, threatened financial consequences for registering, tried to impose ridiculous residency requirements, moved polls far away from campuses, disallowed student IDs for voting purposes.
And they’re still at it, as my colleague Laura Clawson pointed out last month in a story about Texas Republicans working to prevent students from being a major force in the coming elections. Given the record-breaking youth turnout of 2018 in which college students played an important role, Republicans have reason to be worried.
Here, from the Tufts University-based Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, are two charts showing why:
While the youth turnout rose sharply over the 2014 midterms, this varied hugely state by state. In the 42 states that provided data in such matters, this was the result in 2018:
In addition to paying more attention to other demographics whose voting patterns favor Democrats and liberal policies—black Americans being a key group—activists should take advantage of the rise in the midterm youth vote to increase it even more. Not just to give us more chance of booting Trump out of the White House, but because this also will boost chances for gaining the Senate majority and for overturning (or at least weakening GOP) majorities in state legislatures where we are getting killed policywise. Besides the partisan advantage, however, there is also the fact that the youth vote is the law, something all-too-many Republicans—especially the latest version—like to ignore when it’s not designed to protect their privilege and special interests.
Student canvassers are the best persuaders of other students to vote. The party should do all it can to empower them. It also should step in to do its utmost in support of youth resistance in communities where officials try to suppress their vote, whether or not those young people are students. Complaining about the comparatively low youth turnout is rather pointless if the attempts to suppress their vote are given a shrug.
Back in 2006, the Brennan Center for Justice provided some helpful information that still applies to this fight:
College students, like all individuals, are entitled to register and vote in the community that they regard as their principal residence. Under most states’ laws, voting residence is synonymous with domicile, which is determined by physical presence and intent to make that place home. Thus, if a student considers her college community to be her primary residence and has no present intent to leave, she is entitled to register to vote in that community. The student need not be certain as to her residence after graduation, so long as she has no present intention of returning to her parents’ home. The fact that a student resides in a dormitory is irrelevant to her intent to make her school address home. [...]
States have established varying standards and tests for determining a person’s intent with respect to voting residence. In New York, for example, the standard is whether the place is the “center of the individual’s life now, the locus of primary concern.” If this standard were fairly and uniformly applied by election officials, most college students seeking to vote as residents of their colleges would be permitted to do so because most students live principally in their college communities. They eat, sleep and carry out the daily activities of their lives in those communities; they are often deeply involved in part-time employment and community activities within the college community; and they are far more affected by the acts and omissions of local officials in their college community than they are by the acts of local officials in some distant parental community.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, many states incorrectly presumed that students were residents of their parents’ communities unless they could prove otherwise. To overcome the presumption of non-residency, the burden was on students to present evidence of their intent to make the college address their new residence. Such presumptions against student voting generally have been invalidated by courts under the equal protection clause. For example, in Williams v. Salerno, the Second Circuit held that a letter sent by the Westchester County Board of Elections to student applicants, which stated that “[a] college dorm cannot be considered a fixed, permanent or principal home,” created an unconstitutional rule or presumption against student residency. [...]
Increasing the percentage of young people who vote for election now will create lifelong patterns of regular voting. And the party those youths vote for now is likely to be the party most of them stick with throughout their lives. That makes focusing serious political energy on them a good investment in a progressive future.