Inside the GOP’s Assault on Youth Voting Rights 

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

The accelerating efforts by the Trump administration and its allies to unwind the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement have the hallmarks of a new Redemption, the counter-revolution that stripped African-Americans of the civil and political rights they had gained in the Civil War and Reconstruction which ushered in nearly a century of Jim Crow.

Nowhere is this more marked than in the area of voting rights. Just as the myth of the war’s “noble cause” legitimated the end of Black representation in Congress and the systematic disenfranchisement of Black men, the myth of a “stolen” 2020 election is used to justify “election integrity” efforts that are stripping Americans, particularly vulnerable populations, of their essential democratic rights.

The ongoing targeting of voting rights, including the potential evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, limits on mail-in ballots, and the imposition of radical mid-decade racial and partisan gerrymandering, has also included an assault on youth voting rights, a lesser known outcome of the Second Reconstruction.

Youth voting rights were part of the post-war expansion of democratic inclusion and were realized most notably through the 1971 passage of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and banned discrimination based on age in ballot access.

The quickest amendment to be ratified in our nation’s history, it was adopted with near unanimity in the Senate and overwhelming support in the House. Even President Richard Nixon chimed in, declaring that “America’s new voters, America’s young generation” would bring “moral courage” and “a spirit of high idealism” to the country.

Courage and idealism were also essential to the amendment’s passage. A wide coalition of national student and youth organizations, labor, faith organizations, and Democratic and Republican party youth leaders mobilized on college campuses and in the halls of Congress to press for the youth vote. 

That same spirit has been in evidence since the amendment’s ratification nearly 55 years ago, as we outline in our new book, YOUTH VOTING RIGHTS: Civil Rights, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and the Fight for American Democracy on College Campuses. The book explores how different constituencies at four institutions — Tuskegee Institute (now University), North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T), Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU, in Texas), and Bard College (in New York) — often in coordination with non-profit community organizations, organized to promote and defend the right to vote. 

 “Voter integrity” laws hit college students particularly hard. Students are particularly vulnerable because they are often first-time registrants — only 58% of 18-24 year olds are registered — and student voters often live far from home, including in other states. They often lack transportation. Our research shows that college students experience unique and disproportionate obstacles in almost every step of the election administration process. That is only getting worse.

New state laws restrict convenient, basic election modernization tools that a new generation of voters expects, such as online voter registration or curing — i.e. correcting minor errors — on vote-by-mail ballots.

An increasing number of states require that strict identification be presented in-person for registering and voting. Moreover, states like Indiana explicitly exclude college-issued identity cards while others, like Georgia and Wyoming, restrict them to state institutions. In Wisconsin, student voter identification is only valid for voter identification if issued by a state institution, and expires every two years — impacting over 300,000 undergraduate students across the state.

Poll sites are often at great distance from college campuses, which particularly impacts student voters who often do not have their own transportation, and state legislators and local officials target on-campus locations. For example, at Purdue University in Indiana, an on-campus polling site that was available to student voters for four previous presidential cycles was suddenly moved off campus in 2024, impacting the largest student body of any individual university campus in the state. 

Voting absentee is getting more difficult, and President Trump has promised on Truth Social to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.” Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just announced that it will review the constitutionality of a Mississippi vote-by-mail law which allows for ballots to be counted if postmarked before or on Election Day, but received by the state within five business days after Election Day. The ruling may implicate 15 other states with similar laws, and the treatment of military and overseas ballots by 28 other states, potentially adding chaos to the 2026 election. To make matters worse, states such as Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida have also placed limits on, and threatened sanctions against, third-party voter registration organizations, many of which have worked on college campuses for years.  

College students are also disproportionately affected by heretofore unthinkable attempts to retroactively disenfranchise voters who have already lawfully cast ballots. Amidst the unprecedented challenges raised in the 2024 election for North Carolina Supreme Court race, in which a Republican candidate attempted to disqualify the already-cast votes of 60,000 citizens, young voters were 3.4 times more likely to be targeted than those over 65, and Black youth, including those enrolled at HBCUs, were disproportionately impacted.

The Trump administration is directly targeting colleges and their role in the voting process. In August, the Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” guidance letter to college administrators prohibiting institutions from using federal work-study funds to pay students for non-partisan activities, like voter registration, get out the vote efforts, and service as poll workers. The letter also encourages institutions to balance a “good faith effort” to provide voter registration materials to students, mandated by prior legislation, with a series of stark warnings about who is eligible to vote and the consequences of voting illegally. The warnings include reference to the vexing issue of residency, which was seemingly resolved decades ago by the Symm v. United States decision, the sole US Supreme Court case decided on the basis of the 26th Amendment, that affirmed the right of students to register from their college addresses.

This occurs in a context in which institutions of higher education are under attack in ways not seen since the McCarthy era. Most vulnerable of all are students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), which rest at the intersection of attempts to diminish both Black and youth power and whose students and graduates shaped the Second Reconstruction.

Even Tufts University’s National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement (NSLVE), which tracks student voting on campuses, is under attack by right-wing groups who decry the educational value of tracking basic voter participation.

The lesson of our book, and the 26th Amendment more broadly, are that college communities can be effective in promoting and defending voting and voting rights.

First, students need to step up and defend their voting rights. Students at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) offer a powerful model. When they were denied the right to register locally, they sued Waller County, resulting in precedential Supreme Court litigation in Symm.  Since then, PVAMU students have mobilized numerous times to fight voter intimidation and fight for a polling place on campus, organizing, protesting and marching to the county seat. Such are the circumstances that supporting the right to vote is part of the DNA of PVAMU students, carrying on the legacy of students over nearly a half-century.

Second, faculty should be engaged. They can take the lead, like Charles Gomillion, a professor of sociology and sometime administrator of Tuskegee, who was the named litigant in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, a landmark Supreme Court case against the racial gerrymander of the HBCU. They can also advise and guide students, direct them to resources and help form bridges to voting rights organizations like Common Cause, NAACP, ACLU, League of Women Voters, and the Andrew Goodman Foundation.

Finally, institutions themselves also need to step up. The American tradition of liberal education emphasizes the role in higher education in the formation of citizens. In mission statements and graduation speeches, leaders often speak of the importance of engaged citizenship. 

Yet when it comes to supporting and defending the most foundational of democratic rights, their record is mixed. Recently, students from Ivy league schools even complained in Inside Higher Ed that university administrators, rather than supporting their efforts to defend voting rights, informed them that such struggles are beneficial because they help prepare them for challenges later in life. As institutions reel from the Trump administration’s threats, such responses only promise to worsen. 

Colleges need to match their words and their deeds. They should explicitly recognize voting, and educating for democracy more broadly, as a part of their institutional and educational missions. They should act like Bard College, where the trustees passed a resolution supporting the efforts of Student Activists for Voting Equality to secure the right to vote in Dutchess County, and college President Leon Botstein even served as a named litigant alongside his students in the Andrew Goodman Foundation’s successful suit for a polling site on campus. They should also invest institutional resources — moral, financial, intellectual, and organizational — in registering students to vote, transporting them to the polls, educating them about the voting process, providing information about candidates and issues, and defending voting rights when they are under assault.

If our youth cannot participate in the democratic process then what future do we have? Voting should be non-negotiable. If we are to fight this Second Redemption, let alone usher in a new Reconstruction, university communities, in coalition with other civic actors, should tap into the same energy and idealism that animate our case studies and propelled the 26th Amendment. Only then can we assure the better democratic future to which we should all aspire.