Away from Home, Undergraduates Vote Absentee in Primaries

As voters line up at caucuses and primaries across the nation during the contentious 2016 presidential election, some Harvard students cast their votes with stamps and an envelope, sending absentee ballots to their home states.

With the majority of undergraduates hailing from outside of Massachusetts, numerous Harvard students, many of whom are voting for the first time, must request absentee ballots if they want to vote as residents of their home states.

The Institute of Politics has taken an active role in mobilizing and widening the base of college students who vote. The IOP’s college-wide HVOTE initiative assists students in their registration, utilizing the online program TurboVote to streamline the process .

“Within the past two years we have done a lot of grassroots work to have students go out, using the TurboVote software, [to] conduct voter registration drives [and] host events, to get people to come and register,” said Austin E. Sowa ’17, the vice president of the IOP and former student director of the HVOTE campaign.

Sowa emphasized the goal of making registration as easy as possible for busy Harvard students.

“It’s very easy to make excuses to not go out and vote,” said Sowa. “We want to help make sure students don’t have to face those barriers, that the time you spend requesting and getting absentee ballots is minimal, so your efforts can go into learning more about the issues you care about.”

Students who participated in the IOP’s HVOTE campaign reported being satisfied by the ease with which they could register.

“I signed up through TurboVote at the IOP’s open house last semester,” said Malaaz H. Ghandour ’19, a Texas resident who voted in both Houston’s municipal elections in November and the state’s Democratic primary on March 1. “This was my first time voting for anything, so I was excited, especially for the primaries.”

Other students navigated the absentee process without help from the IOP. Andrew B. Pardue ’16, a former Crimson editorial writer, says he requested his ballot two weeks before the March 15 primary in his home state of North Carolina.

“It wasn’t too difficult,” he said. “I didn’t really experience any bumps or bruises on the road filling out the ballot, but I know of a lot of students who did have difficulty getting their ballots in on time.”

One of those students was Pardue’s girlfriend, Emilia T. San Miguel ’16.

“I requested my ballot a week before, which was the deadline,” San Miguel said. “Long story short, I didn’t get my ballot before Election Day.”

Last fall, more than 50 percent of Harvard undergraduates were registered to vote, Sowa said, adding that HVOTE aims for a registration rate of above 75 percent. He said he hoped that more students would be inclined to register in the general election.

“It’s good to see so much momentum being built from the students, and I hope that eventually we will be able to get students to participate across the board,” Sowa said.