Why Get out The Vote Programs for College Students May be Focusing on the Wrong Problems
I wanted to offer some unsolicited thoughts about some of the difficulties of registering students on college campuses and driving voter turnout. A lot of the public conversation on these issues tends to center around driving up interest, fighting perceived apathy, etc. These are all serious and important, but I think it misses out on a major barrier to college student voting that is much more focused on the less exciting but more solvable problems of process and bureaucracy. In my time working on this, I saw very little apathy but a lot of wariness that they do not want to screw anything up... by filling out the wrong form at the wrong time. A pause to explain my qualifications to speak on this issue. While it was now some time ago, I was a student at the University of Missouri where I led the university's non-partisan voter registration and turnout drive for the 2002 midterms. In that election, we registered over 1,000 new student voters and increase...