THE VOTING WARS COME TO CAMPUS.

• Author: Block, Daniel

STUDENTS FACE A GROWING MAZE OF VOTING RESTRICTIONS. CAN THEY FIND THEIR WAY THROUGH IN TIME FOR 2020?

Texas: home of corn dogs, Matthew McConaughey, and some of America's most restrictive voting laws. To register yourself, you have to print out a form and deliver it to the county clerk, because unlike most states, Texas has no online voter registration. To help register others, you must be certified as a "volunteer deputy registrar," a process that requires either taking an exam or attending an often long and awkwardly timed training session. Your certificate is only valid in the county where it is obtained.

The state has also made it harder to cast a ballot. Between 2013 and 2016, Texas eliminated more than 400 polling locations, the largest drop in any state during that time. In 2013, after years of litigation, it implemented a strict voter ID law. The law, which lists seven kinds of acceptable IDs, became infamous for its brazenly partisan implications--handgun licenses are okay, for example, while student IDs are not.

All of which makes the following statistic so surprising: at the University of Texas at Austin, the state's flagship university, undergraduate turnout increased from almost 39 percent to 53 percent between 2012 and 2016. Over that same time period, national youth turnout stayed roughly constant. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University, which calculates campus voting rates, has not yet released numbers for last year's midterms. But at UT Austin's on-campus polling locations, the number of early ballots cast was more than three times higher than it was in 2014. (Travis County only provides polling site specific data for early voting.)

The state of Texas is not alone in seeming to apply tougher voting rules to college students, who as a group are more left leaning than the overall electorate. In New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Arizona--all presidential battlegrounds--Republican-controlled legislatures have created particular obstacles for college voters. And yet, in the midst of this clamp down, there are dear signs that students and schools are surmounting voting barriers and countering their impact--and not just in Texas. At Arizona State University in Tempe, for example, despite a restrictive voter ID law and new limits on mail-in ballot collection, student voting rates went up by double digits between 2012 and 2016.

That's because at institutions like UT Austin and ASU Tempe, students and staff work to make registering and voting as easy as possible, even as Texas and Arizona have made it harder. They find new, creative ways of registering students. They explain complex voting requirements. They work with local officials to increase polling access on campus. In doing so, they are supported by a growing network of national organizations that provide funding, share information, and help schools develop plans to simplify getting out the vote. (The Washington Monthly incorporates data from these organizations in its college rankings, detailed on page 64. Both UT Austin and ASU Tempe received perfect scores.)

These efforts appear to be making a difference. Nationwide, college voting rates increased by more than three percentage points between 2012 and 2016, more than the overall turnout increase. Between 2014 and 2018, youth turnout rose by nearly a third.

In an era of high partisanship and close contests, student voting can make a tremendous impact. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won her U.S. Senate seat by 55,900 votes, roughly the size of ASU Tempes student population. In Texas, youth turnout tripled between 2014 and 2018, and Democrat Beto O'Rourke overperformed in counties with a high percentage of young voters. That means that UT Austin was at the vanguard of a trend that helped bring O'Rourke surprisingly close to unseating Ted Cruz from the U.S. Senate.

The increase in student voting is counterintuitive, but it fits a broader pattern. Even as franchise restrictions target certain communities, political scientists have found that they...