Will Barriers to Student Voting at UNC-Chapel Hill Impact Election Results?

Mail-in voting presents a challenge to UNC Chapel Hill Students, and the administration is doing little to make voting easier. Source.

Students at UNC-Chapel Hill have been clear in their demands to administration: they want time off to vote. Sophomore Lamar Richards, in collaboration with other UNC student leaders, sent a letter last month to the UNC administration asking for an academic holiday on November 3, the day of the 2020 general election. 

UNC’s response? It’s not happening.

“Due to our greatly compressed academic calendar, we are unable to make that accommodation,” UNC Vice-Chancellor for University Communications Joel Curran said in a statement.

Richards and other student leaders remain determined to reach a compromise, because according to them, there are too many barriers standing in the way of student voting. 

They aren’t wrong. The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique challenge to student voters, most of whom left UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus when instruction went fully remote in August. Students who moved home after having previously used their dorm addresses for voter registration have to change their registered voting location. Those with worries about voting in person due to COVID-19 then have to request an absentee ballot. 

For students taking a full course load of online classes, this is a big deal. Students across the country have reported having more assignments in online instruction than they did taking in-person classes, and consequently less time to spend on civic engagement. 

Those that do manage to send in absentee ballots could face further difficulty: in NC’s March Primary Elections, 17% of the mail-in ballots cast by 18-25 year olds were rejected, nearly half of which were due to not meeting the mail-in deadline. This is especially concerning given the nationwide slowdown of the USPS (United States Postal Service), and that only ballots which arrive by 5 pm on November 6th will be counted.

In March, only 6% of ballots were cast by 18-24 year olds, raising questions about whether time off to vote would matter to the majority of UNC students. However, records indicate a recent spike in voter registration for Orange County, with nearly 170,000 new registrations in NC’s 4th Congressional District, which also includes Cary and parts of Raleigh. Additionally, 42% of newly registered voters across North Carolina are under 30. 

While voter registration is up across the board heading into the 2020 general election, these numbers are fairly clear: young people want to vote. 

Finding politically engaged students at UNC isn’t a challenge. The university boasts over 20 politically focused clubs and organizations, nonpartisan and partisan alike. For decades, UNC students have demonstrated a passion for social justice movements and community engagement, and although continued social justice protests draw a lot of that attention, this engagement also includes voting. In the 2018 Midterm elections, youth voters in Orange County flocked to the polls en masse. 

So where does this leave the many students that want to vote, but are challenged by class schedules? 

Currently, they’re just going to have to find the time, whether that means requesting and mailing an absentee ballot or travelling to a polling place in person. 

Technically speaking, UNC does have the power to declare an academic holiday for students to vote, but this would have to be done carefully. The Fall 2020 semester is heavily compressed in comparison to normal years. The plan was originally designed for in-person instruction to prevent students from leaving for Thanksgiving break and returning for finals, which would have raised COVID-19 transmission risks, and the schedule wasn’t updated when instruction went online.