The 2024 presidential election is less than a month away, and many at Troy University will be voting for the first time – including myself.
I’m pretty lucky to be registered to vote in a town just over an hour away, as I can’t move my poll location to Troy since my dormitory doesn’t count as a residence.
However, many students at Troy are registered to vote at much further locations. While there are other options, like voting by mail or absentee voting, college students face more barriers to voting than most other demographics.
It is commonly argued that older adults don’t get the day off to vote, so college students shouldn’t either – but unlike older adults, college-aged students have never voted before and may not even be registered to vote anywhere near the college where they live.
I have friends who I have seen first-hand become so overwhelmed with the rules and steps needed to register for an alternative voting method that they gave up.
Every year, millions of Americans don’t vote because of work or school schedules. In the 2000 election, the state of Florida, for example, was decided by 537 votes, but, according to the Pew Research Center, 19 million registered voters nationwide didn’t make it to the polls with about 4 million of them citing schedule conflicts as the reason why.
Most democratic countries have their elections on either holidays or weekends, so why don’t we?
According to Britannica, in 1845, congress declared the second Tuesday in November as Election Day because it was right after the harvest and a convenient time for farmers to ride to town on their horses: Sunday was church, Wednesday was market and Monday was for travel. A law once intended to make voting more convenient now has the opposite effect.
In years past, college students have been among the lowest demographic to vote, but that is changing. In 2020, over half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 voted in the 2020 general election, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. College students want to vote.
The university should make it as easy for them as possible. Offering class excuses would eliminate one more barrier and make voting a tad bit easier.
Voting is an important element of being an active member of a nation, and it gives us a way to engage with the policies that will affect our day-to-day lives. An important part of a university’s job is to help cultivate students who are responsible community members.
You can see how the values of higher education line up with getting college students excited to vote, to lead and be involved.
By offering class excuses, the university would be signaling to everyone that voting matters to them, too.
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