How GOP Election Boards Are Attacking College Voters

Mother Jones illustration; Getty(2) Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. When the Republican-controlled Guilford County Board of Elections rejected North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University students’ request for an on-campus early voting location, students like Jimmie Holton Jr. had two options: Pay up to $30 for a rideshare or walk 45 minutes in 85-degree heat to the nearest site. Like many of the school’s students, Holton didn’t have a car. So he and 300 other students in Greensboro chose to walk. Their march to the polls went viral in October. Three in four higher ed institutions do not have any in-person voting options on campus, a 2024 study found. Now, local Republican election officials are taking away the few that do exist. There are nearly 20 million college students, like Holton, who are eligible to vote across the United States—but their ability to get to polling places has become a critical issue in battleground states where tight races will determine whether Democrats flip the Senate. In Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio, Republican election officials have slashed voting sites at campuses serving large numbers of Black and Latino students. Those students, once derided by their elders as the most politically apathetic voting bloc in decades, are pushing back. “It’s the Project 2025 playbook being carried out at the local level, and people need to pay attention,” said Alisa Simmons, a commissioner in Tarrant County, Texas, where a Republican majority voted in September to eliminate 92 approved polling locations ahead of the midterms. “If you didn’t want students to vote—well, now, you’re really getting them to vote,” said the University of Texas at Arlington’s student body president. Among polling places left off the approved list in Tarrant County: The University of Texas at Arlington, which had used its Maverick Activities Center as a voting location since 2012. UT Arlington has nearly 43,000 students, about two-thirds of whom identify as people of color. In 2024, more than 8,000 people cast early votes there, according to OpenCampus. Simmons and one other commissioner—the board’s only Democrats—were alone on the five-member Tarrant County Commissioners’ Court in opposing the reduction of polling locations ahead of the midterms. Earlier this month, a judge ruled against an effort to reinstate the 92 locations. “If you didn’t want students to vote—well, now, you’re really getting them to vote,” said Andres Morales, UT Arlington’s student body president. By eliminating the campus’ polling site, Morales said, election officials “created a fire that I don’t think they would have realized if they hadn’t taken it away.” Students have mobilized with renewed energy on campus, he said, organizing voter registration drives, early voting parties, and free transportation to voting locations: “You cannot go more than 100 yards without someone coming up to you and saying, ‘Hey, are you registered to vote?’” In North Carolina, where the Guilford County Board of Elections voted 3-2 along party lines in August to deny on-campus early voting locations at both North Carolina A&T and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, students at both schools and the nearby Bennett College, a historically Black women’s liberal arts college, worked together to organize an early voting march to the polls. “You have 3,500 students who are essentially landlocked,” said Shia Rozier, a senior at NC A&T and co-founder of Protect Ours NC. “It essentially creates a modern-day poll tax.” It’s not just getting to the polls in between classes and jobs that makes it hard for students to vote in person. In Ohio, students at the historically Black Central State University are planning six-mile trips to vote in person after the Greene County Board of Elections moved their nearest polling location from an adjacent university to a church a two-and-a-half-hour walk from campus. National and local organizations gathered on CSU’s campus this week to help students make voting plans. For students registering to vote in a new state while enrolled, student IDs aren’t considered a valid form of identification, said Fernanda Maldonado, political director at MOVE Texas, a youth civic engagement nonprofit. Texas is also one of eight states not to offer online voter registration, meaning students—a transient population moving frequently between dorms and apartments—constantly need to update their registration in person. “What we’ve been seeing with the diminishing of the campus polling locations overall is these systemic obstacles that they’re having to navigate, and each one of those hits young voters more,” Maldonado said. Simmons, the Tarrant County commissioner in Texas, called cutting voting locations in areas like college campuses, which are heavily diverse and skew Democratic, obvious voter suppression. “This is an attempt to confuse voters, to have voters of color just throw their hands up and say, ‘Well, forget it. I’m not going to vote,” Simmons said. “If you are afraid of your opponent, you should just run a great race. But disenfranchising your constituents and the voters—the blowback is not looking good for them.”