Trump’s voter crackdown reaches college campuses - Politico

Colleges play a critical role in helping students vote in what is often their first chance to cast a ballot. | Nam Y. Huh/AP

College campuses are already getting a taste of President Donald Trump’s effort to impose broad, new voting restrictions across the country.

While Trump’s push for a partisan elections bill faces several bottlenecks on Capitol Hill, his administration has spent months quietly chipping away at programs designed to boost turnout among a voting bloc Republicans say lean Democratic.

Colleges play a critical role in helping students vote in what is often their first chance to cast a ballot. But the Trump administration is barring colleges from using a federal program that employs low-income students to register voters and threatening to investigate schools if they use data from a nonpartisan student voting study to help boost turnout.

The Education Department has also warned colleges not to violate election laws — and told schools to limit who they share voter registration information with — even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud on campuses.

The actions by Trump, who continues to make false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, could dampen student participation in a midterm election where control of Congress may be decided by small margins.

“They want to suppress youth voting,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said of the administration’s efforts. “And they’re looking for every way they can to throw a little sand in the gears, to put a few rocks in the way, to roll back any programs that might help get people registered and to the polls.”

Almost 50 million people between the ages 18 to 29 were eligible to vote in the 2024 election, according to a study by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. About 47 percent of those people voted, with the majority skewing toward former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

But 18- and 19-year-olds had lower turnout rates to the polls at 41 percent.

On college campuses, preliminary data from the Tufts study shows the student voting rate at 53 percent is significantly higher than the broader 18-29 age group and 76 percent of students are registered to vote.

But Scott Walker, former Wisconsin governor and president of Young America’s Foundation, a prominent conservative youth organization, rejected the idea that Trump and other Republicans don’t want students to vote.

“We are not afraid of younger voters,” he said. “We are afraid of younger voters who only hear one side of the story. This is why we work so hard to get conservative voices on campus to try to counterbalance the significant liberal bias at most colleges and universities.”

Many colleges host polling sites on their campuses during election years. Congress also requires these schools to distribute paper copies of in-state voter registration forms to students before their state’s deadline.

But Republicans have grown increasingly wary about election security, with one GOP strategist giving a presentation at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in 2023 calling for limits on voting on college campuses.

The GOP-backed SAVE America Act would institute strict new citizenship and photo ID requirements for voting. Trump has told Republican lawmakers that SAVE must be their priority and threatened to refuse any other bill until it is passed.

“Voter ID is fundamental,” said Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who is supportive of the voting measure in Congress and a law passed in his state last year that barred the use of campus IDs for voting. “It’s pretty common sense.”

More than a dozen states — largely red states — restrict the use of some student IDs to vote. Florida and New Hampshire state lawmakers have passed similar measures tightening voter ID laws this legislative session and others are starting to weigh legislation.

When asked if the rollback of the use of campus IDs could hurt student voting, Banks responded: “That’s ridiculous.”

Youth turnout has climbed since Trump’s first election in 2016, when just 39 percent of young voters cast ballots, according to the Tufts study. In 2020, when Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, youth participation rose to roughly 50 percent.