With thousands of NC college students now online-only, where do they vote?

Voting amid the pandemic will be more of a challenge for college students who registered to vote on campus, but now find themselves taking classes online in another county or state.

“Students face barriers to voting in a normal election year, and those barriers have increased this year,” said Rachel Weber, press secretary for the North Carolina chapter of NextGen America, a voter registration program that focuses on young adults.

“Students across the state are in totally different situations. Maybe they are on their college campuses and they are registering to vote (there). Maybe they went back home and have to update their registration. Maybe they are voting by mail or are trying to vote in person.”

Emily Sears, a Queens senior and the Civic Engagement Fellow at Queens University of Charlotte, is working to help alleviate confusion. Sears is particularly concerned about students who returned to their hometowns and expect to vote there.

“Your registration must be changed to reflect your current physical address before you can vote in your hometown,” Sears pointed out.

There is also still time for those students to ask for an absentee ballot from the county of their college campus.

All Queens students are taking classes online this semester. The same is true in Charlotte for Johnson C. Smith University. UNC Charlotte also is online, but it plans to return some students to campus for a limited number of programs on Thursday.

Across the state, some of North Carolina’s largest universities are also holding classes online. They include UNC Chapel Hill, NC State University and East Carolina University.

Early in the pandemic, voter registration in the state declined among people ages 18-35, Weber said. Over the summer, however, registrations rebounded. In July, those registrations totaled more than 31,000. In August, new registrations hit 45,000.

Weber said she did not know how many college students were among those registrations. But a recent report on college-age voters from Tufts University indicates that registrations for voters ages 18-24 are up in North Carolina.

By August, North Carolina was among eight states that had registered more voters in that age group than it did for either the 2016 or 2018 elections, according to Tufts’ Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

Students have three options if they are registered in the county of their university campus but now live elsewhere:

• Request an absentee ballot through the NC Board of Elections website. The official deadline is Oct. 27, but Mecklenburg’s board of elections advises that you do this by no later than mid-October to ensure your ballot can be returned in time to be counted.
• Submit a change of registration form, also available on the state Board of Elections website. The deadline to make this request is Oct. 9. Doing this should allow you to vote where you now live.
• Travel to the county of your university campus and cast your vote, either on Nov. 3, Election Day, or during Early Voting (Oct. 15-31). Mecklenburg is adding more early voting locations this year to help with social distancing.

Unsure of where you are registered to vote? You can check here. Haven’t registered? The deadline is Oct. 9. You can register by mail (postmarked no later than Oct. 9). The form to fill out is on the state Board of Elections website.

Sears, 21, is a political science major taking classes online from her home in Waynesville. She intends to join her father at the polls in voting there.

“I think that the pandemic has brought the issue of voting to the forefront of everyone’s mind, but particularly for college students,” Sears said. “It is my sincere hope that people my age realize just how much of their lives are tied to the policies that are being enacted by our elected officials.”

Tellez-Duran is a student in a political reporting seminar in the James L. Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte.

This story was originally published September 30, 2020 at 10:33 AM.