[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 136 (Tuesday, October 16, 2012)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1703-E1704]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     SUPPORT FOR VOTER EDUCATION EFFORTS BY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, October 16, 2012

  Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my thanks and 
support for recent actions by Northwestern University to help students 
register to vote and navigate increasingly complex and strict voter 
registration procedures nationwide. Their efforts were chronicled in an 
article by the New York Times this past Sunday, and I hope that my 
colleagues will pay attention to the story and its lessons.
  Today, roughly 11 million college students are eligible to vote. 
Unfortunately, states across the country have considered or passed 
legislative initiatives that erect barriers to student voting. 
Northwestern University, which I am proud to represent, rose to the 
challenge and adopted a series of policies to ensure that its student 
body could go to the polls. When incoming freshman picked up their 
student IDs, they were given the opportunity to register to vote. 
Volunteers took time out of their day to make sure that out-of-state 
students were given absentee request forms, and any assistance they 
required so that their vote would count when they engaged in their 
civic duty.
  As last weekend's article noted, Northwestern University's 
initiatives were wildly successful. Last year, 89% of incoming 
Northwestern freshmen were registered to vote in 37 states by the first 
day of class. This year, the university again saw dramatic success--
almost 95% of their eligible freshman were registered as of the first 
day of classes, and out-of-state students had the tools to make sure 
their vote was not denied due to new state regulations.
  After the enormous success seen on its campus, Northwestern 
University expanded its project and created the UVote Project. The 
UVote Project shares these proven registration techniques to campuses 
across the nation--providing consistent and streamlined registration 
efforts so that students get the support they need to participate in 
the democratic process. According to the project's web page, schools 
who adopt these methods typically see their student voter registration 
rates double or triple.
  These recent efforts by Northwestern University and their UVote 
Project are the type of collaboration between students and institutions 
of higher learning that I envisioned when I introduced the Student 
VOTER Act, a bill that would make institutions of higher learning play 
a key role in voter registration efforts. The contents of this bill 
have been incorporated into H.R. 5799, the Voter Empowerment Act of 
2012. The Voter Empowerment Act modernizes and overhauls our voter 
registration system to assure that as many people are involved in our 
democratic process as possible, and I urge my colleagues to support it.
  I congratulate Northwestern President Morty Shapiro and hope other 
universities will follow his lead. Together, through policies like 
those created by Northwestern University and through legislation such 
as the Voter Empowerment Act of 2012, we can encourage increased 
engagement and participation, including among student voters.

                [From the New York Times, Oct. 13, 2012]

              Colleges Take a Leap Into Voter Registration

                          (By Steven Yaccino)

       Evanston, IL.--Every four years, volunteers swarm 
     university campuses, clipboards in hand, to register newly 
     eligible voters for what is generally the only presidential 
     election of their undergraduate careers. This year they found 
     large numbers were already registered.
       Dozens of colleges have begun their own voting registration 
     drives in orientation programs, class registration, intranet 
     Web sites and other interactions crucial to campus life, 
     institutionalizing services that had often been left to 
     outside efforts. As a result, thousands of students 
     registered to vote, updated their addresses or requested 
     absentee ballots from their home states within days of 
     arriving to campus this fall, officials at several 
     universities said.
       University-sponsored attempts to make voting easier for 
     students are being tested in at least 60 colleges across the 
     country amid the outbreak of battles over new voting laws.
       ``The voter registration process has become more cumbersome 
     and difficult as there's been a competition to define who is 
     eligible to vote,'' said Dan A. Lewis, director of 
     Northwestern University's Center for Civic Engagement, which 
     started incorporating voter registration into its freshman 
     orientation last year. ``You almost have to have a Ph.D. now 
     to figure out how to do it if you're not sitting in the same 
     house for the past 20 years.''
       Northwestern officials who developed the new program, UVote 
     Project, said their intent was not to critique voting rules 
     across the country, but to help students navigate them more 
     easily.
       ``We're not always going to have the incredible excitement 
     among 18- to 22-year-olds that you did in 2008, so I think 
     it's an obligation,'' said Morton Schapiro, the president of 
     Northwestern. ``We're supposed to teach citizenship.''
       Northwestern, just north of Chicago, began a drive to 
     register voters last year, with incoming students signing up 
     when they picked up their campus IDs. University-trained 
     staff and volunteers provided absentee ballot request forms 
     from all 50 states, scanned students' driver's licenses or 
     other identification, and offered to mail in the paperwork.
       By the first day of class, 89 percent of the university's 
     freshmen had been registered to vote, in 37 states. 
     Northwestern repeated the effort this year, registering 
     almost 95 percent of eligible freshmen, and expanded the 
     model to eight other colleges. Stanford University used the 
     method around campus, including on its bicycle registration 
     line, netting more than 700 new voters in two weeks.
       Roughly 11 million eligible voters ages 18 to 24 are in 
     college, about a quarter of all eligible young voters, 
     according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic 
     Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
       The federal Higher Education Amendments of 1998 require 
     colleges to make a ``good faith effort'' to distribute 
     registration materials to transient students, who have the 
     option to establish residency in their home community or 
     where they go to school.
       Students who prefer to vote absentee must first traverse an 
     array of varied rules. Some states, like Michigan and 
     Tennessee, make voters who register by mail cast a ballot in 
     person for their first election. North Carolina requires that 
     ballot requests be handwritten. Other states, like Delaware 
     and Wyoming, require a notary.
       Complicating matters more this election have been partisan 
     fights over restrictions on registration drives and new laws 
     requiring state-issued IDs for voting, though many have been 
     overturned or blocked this year.
       Harvard University, which holds a competition among 
     dormitories to register the most voters, is one of a growing 
     number of schools expanding efforts by purchasing access to 
     the Web site of TurboVote, a nonprofit effort that provides 
     complete online registration and automated vote-bymail 
     services.
       Founded in 2010, TurboVote is working with 58 colleges this 
     year. It now helps more than 100,000 individuals get absentee 
     ballots, find voting locations and track coming elections, 
     sending out text reminders for important deadlines.
       ``We single-handedly registered more people in a couple of 
     hours than several organizations that have been doing this 
     for months,'' said Shelby Taylor, a spokeswoman for the 
     University of Florida, which promoted TurboVote on the 
     college's intranet home page and in an e-mail from the 
     university's president. The school, which registered more 
     than 3,000 students this year, also flashed ads for TurboVote 
     on the football stadium's GatorVision screen during the 
     opening home game last month.
       ``We alone cannot do this,'' said Heather Smith, president 
     of Rock the Vote, which has been registering voters on 
     campuses for two decades. ``If we could get every university 
     engaged and invested in the work of asking every one of their 
     students to register to vote, we'd have a very different 
     democracy.''

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