Trump’s voter crackdown reaches college campuses

College campuses are already getting a taste of President Donald Trump’s effort to impose broad, new voting restrictions across the country.

While Trump’s push for a partisan elections bill faces several bottlenecks on Capitol Hill, his administration has spent months quietly chipping away at programs designed to boost turnout among a voting bloc Republicans say lean Democratic.

Colleges play a critical role in helping students vote in what is often their first chance to cast a ballot. But the Trump administration is barring colleges from using a federal program that employs low-income students to register voters and threatening to investigate schools if they use data from a nonpartisan student voting study to help boost turnout.

The Education Department has also warned colleges not to violate election laws — and told schools to limit who they share voter registration information with — even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud on campuses.

The actions by Trump, who continues to make false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, could dampen student participation in a midterm election where control of Congress may be decided by small margins.

“They want to suppress youth voting,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said of the administration’s efforts. “And they're looking for every way they can to throw a little sand in the gears, to put a few rocks in the way, to roll back any programs that might help get people registered and to the polls.”

Almost 50 million people between the ages 18 to 29 were eligible to vote in the 2024 election, according to a study by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. About 47 percent of those people voted, with the majority skewing toward former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

But 18- and 19-year-olds had lower turnout rates to the polls at 41 percent.

On college campuses, preliminary data from the Tufts study shows the student voting rate at 53 percent is significantly higher than the broader 18-29 age group and 76 percent of students are registered to vote.

But Scott Walker, former Wisconsin governor and president of Young America’s Foundation, a prominent conservative youth organization, rejected the idea that Trump and other Republicans don’t want students to vote.

"We are not afraid of younger voters,” he said. “We are afraid of younger voters who only hear one side of the story. This is why we work so hard to get conservative voices on campus to try to counterbalance the significant liberal bias at most colleges and universities.”

Many colleges host polling sites on their campuses during election years. Congress also requires these schools to distribute paper copies of in-state voter registration forms to students before their state’s deadline.

But Republicans have grown increasingly wary about election security, with one GOP strategist giving a presentation at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in 2023 calling for limits on voting on college campuses.

The GOP-backed SAVE America Act would institute strict new citizenship and photo ID requirements for voting. Trump has told Republican lawmakers that SAVE must be their priority and threatened to refuse any other bill until it is passed.

“Voter ID is fundamental,” said Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who is supportive of the voting measure in Congress and a law passed in his state last year that barred the use of campus IDs for voting. “It's pretty common sense.”

More than a dozen states — largely red states — restrict the use of some student IDs to vote. Florida and New Hampshire state lawmakers have passed similar measures tightening voter ID laws this legislative session and others are starting to weigh legislation.

When asked if the rollback of the use of campus IDs could hurt student voting, Banks responded: “That's ridiculous.”

Youth turnout has climbed since Trump’s first election in 2016, when just 39 percent of young voters cast ballots, according to the Tufts study. In 2020, when Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, youth participation rose to roughly 50 percent.

College-aged voters historically have lower turnout than older voters and often face hurdles casting ballots. This includes lack of transportation and navigating residency requirements and often knotty absentee ballot requirements for out-of-state students.

And even without the SAVE measure passing, Democrats and voting advocates warn actions already taken by the Education Department will erode recent gains in youth turnout.

“Whether it's a SAVE Act or other things, it's just intentionally trying to make it harder to vote in America — and in particular, going after demographics that the Republicans think are not on their side,” said Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), who is part of a group of Democratic lawmakers pushing back on the Education Department’s moves.

One of those moves is barring colleges from using the agency’s Federal Work Study program to pay students for any work involving voting activity. The need-based federal aid program requires low-income students to work part-time jobs, typically on campus, to help fund their education. Colleges were deploying some of these students to help meet their voter registration mandates.

But the Trump Education Department in August rescinded Biden-era guidance that allowed the program to be used to employ students for voter registration activities that take place on or off-campus. The Biden administration expanded the program’s employment eligibility to include nonpartisan civic engagement work done for public entities, sparking an outcry from House GOP lawmakers and Republican attorneys general.

“The Trump Administration has been clear: our educational institutions should focus on providing students with real-world, workforce-oriented experiences, not engaging in political activism aimed at influencing elections,” said Ellen Keast, the department’s press secretary for higher education. “Protecting the integrity of American elections is critical to the security of our nation. If so-called voting advocates take issue with that, it raises serious questions about whether they are in the right line of work.”

But voting advocates and former Biden Education Department officials argue the Trump administration's guidance goes further than undoing the prior policy.

“They don’t have the authority to prohibit colleges from hiring to do that kind of work using work-study funds because it’s contrary to statute,” said Amanda Fuchs Miller, who served as deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs under the Biden administration.

The guidance also “tells colleges that they don’t have to send all students voter registration forms,” which contradicts their legal requirements, she said.

The department is directing colleges to be more selective of which students get voter registration papers, interpreting the law more narrowly to say schools may “limit” who they give the forms to, and warning them against aiding and abetting voter fraud by noncitizens.

“Campuses aren't there to determine who is eligible or who is not eligible to register to vote,” said Rebekah Caruthers, president of the Fair Elections Center, a national voting rights organization.

“This administration is putting pressure on campuses and is trying to create a chilling effect to make campuses scared to do civic engagement and civic learning,” she added.

In February, the department launched a probe into The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University — the largest study of U.S. college student political participation. More than 1,200 colleges and universities from all 50 states and the District of Columbia voluntarily participate in the study, which has produced data on voter registration and turnout for every midterm and presidential election since 2016.

The study gives colleges private, individual-tailored reports with data on their students' voter participation, which they use as a tool to improve their voting rates. But the department accused Tufts and the National Student Clearinghouse, an education research group, of violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which protects student education records. The agency also sent letters to more than 1,000 university presidents advising them to refrain from using the report data or risk their own FERPA investigations.

Tufts in March acquiesced to the department’s request to delay the release of its report analyzing the 2024 election — which was expected earlier this year — until after the agency’s investigation has concluded. And Clearinghouse, which played a key role in processing student data, has ended its participation.

“When we see an administration that's using the bully pulpit and all of the resources of the federal government to restrict voting rights, we have to ring the alarm,” Caruthers said.