At student voting summit, organizers tackle apathy, education

COLLEGE PARK, Md.—Nicholas Crookston, who leads campus engagement efforts for the civic engagement nonprofit Voto Latino, opened the National Student Voter Summit Thursday morning by announcing how much student voter engagement efforts grew this past election cycle. In 2024, around 900 total minority-serving institutions, historically Black colleges and universities, and community colleges celebrated civic holidays, like National Voter Registration Week, which takes place in early October, he said. And 47 MSIs, rural colleges and community colleges joined the Ask Every Student initiative, pledging to ask every student on campus to engage in the democratic process.

Other attendees at the summit, held at the University of Maryland, shared specific examples of engagement from their own campuses: football players helping dozens of teammates register to vote, parades to the polls featuring live music and dancing, student podcasters interviewing local candidates.

But despite such efforts, student voting did not appear to soar to unprecedented heights, as many in the nonpartisan student voting space had hoped. Definitive numbers of how many college students voted are not available yet, but an analysis of exit poll data by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) shows youth voting down about eight percentage points from the record high of 2020.

At the summit, hosted by the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, the participants—about half of whom are students themselves—seemed more invigorated by the wins they’d experienced over the past election cycle than by the overall drop in youth turnout. At the same time, they largely agreed on what might have caused the decline: apathy.

It’s a dirty word to some in the student voter engagement sphere. They argue that students who do not vote are blocked by systemic barriers rather than by their own disinvestment in politics. But more than a handful of attendees said they observed apathy on their campuses this cycle because students found both candidates unexciting, because they doubted their vote would make a difference or because voting seemed like another obligation in a laundry list of things they worried about making time for. When a panelist asked who in the room had encountered any students over the past several months who were disillusioned with both presidential candidates, virtually every attendee raised their hand.

“The majority of nonvoters that I’ve talked to didn’t vote because of these single issues [like the war in Gaza]: ‘My representative doesn’t represent me on this issue, so why would I vote for y’all?’” said Kat Delarosa, a student at Austin Community College.

She said that when she tried to register students to vote on campus over the past several months, a significant number told her they didn’t plan to cast ballots. “More than I expected, because I tend to be an optimist when it comes to Gen Z, and I’m really proud of the way we’ve been shifting culture.”

Some said they saw the greatest flurry of excitement about politics after the results were announced. Caleb Gustavson, a member of the Student Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) who attends Georgia State University, said many young people approached him to get involved in Student PIRG’s new voter engagement efforts in the days following the election.

“Coming out of any election, you’re going to have people who maybe are not happy with the result and want substantive ways they can get involved,” he said.

Clarissa Unger, SLSV’s executive director, saw the postelection spike in interest firsthand; she said SLSV received dozens of new requests to attend the conference in the two weeks since the election results were announced on Nov. 6.

But keeping students’ interested in politics until the next election—and beyond—is difficult. It’s also why the summit is held so close to Election Day, Unger said—to ensure that the organizers’ own momentum doesn’t get a chance to slow.

Attacking Apathy

In a session focused on goal-setting for the upcoming year—both at the campus level and for the coalition at large—participants debated the best ways to address the key issues they faced during this election season. Some argued they could combat apathy by making voting, and civic engagement broadly, more casual, to help their peers see it as something easy and straightforward, rather than an interruption to their routine. Mason Hill, a senior at the University of Maryland and an intern at VoteRiders, a voting rights nonprofit, said that one of his goals is to “have the courage” to bring civic engagement up in casual conversation, even with people he would usually be wary of talking politics with.

Others argued that while it’s good to make political engagement more normalized, it shouldn’t be so regular and casual that students lump it in with their homework, laundry and workout routines—things they skip when they’re feeling tired or short on time.

As a person of color, I know the history of how my people have fought for these rights, so I carry that with me. It’s a right that wasn’t given, it was earned. When you think of it like that, you’re more grateful for it.”

—Christian Ramos, Virginia Tech student

“The goal really is to make voting and involvement in democratic processes a thing people are proud to do and also a thing they’re going to do willingly and be more empowered to do,” said Christian Ramos of Virginia Tech. “As a person of color, I know the history of how my people have fought for these rights, so I carry that with me. It’s a right that wasn’t given, it was earned. When you think of it like that, you’re more grateful for it. You kind of realize it’s something to take seriously. It’s as if you were to walk around with the ashes of your grandma. You’re not going to throw that around and swing it around. You’re going to be careful with how you hold it and careful with how you place it.”

Some proposed that student voter groups should better leverage local elections as a gateway to national voting, since it can be more evident to students that their votes in those races hold weight and impact them directly. The importance of voter education was another common theme, with one student noting that it’s difficult to get students to care about, say, a mayoral election if they have no idea how their city is run.

But Unger, the coalition’s executive director, said she’s been trying to remind herself that many factors outside of SLSV’s work played a role in the less-than-ideal youth voter turnout this year.

“The work we do through the coalition and with higher ed institutions is not based around any one election cycle,” she said. “We have set up the work to be sustained, and we’re going to have to try to do our best to sustain it in an unpredictable landscape for higher ed in general.”