Background

The youth vote holds significant influence, particularly in North Carolina, which ranks among the top ten states where young voters can impact electoral outcomes. Eligible youth voters make up 21% of the population, underscoring their potential to shape elections. However, the right for students to vote in North Carolina is currently under threat.

Provisional ballots – or ballots used by voters whose eligibility cannot be verified at their polling site – are supposed to be a failsafe for voters experiencing difficulties with their voter registration. Increasingly, however, regulatory practices around provisional ballots are depriving young voters of their right to vote. 

For example, in the spring primary of 2024, 1 out of 8 Duke students had their vote thrown out through provisional balloting. At North Carolina Central University, 47% of the ballots cast on election day in 2022 were provisional and 98% of these ballots were discarded. 

This troubling trend is occurring across North Carolina because of enduring problems in the state’s voter registration system that penalize transient citizens without readily verifiable mailing addresses. Indeed, the problem is getting worse because of new provisions under two related laws that require a photo ID to vote (S.B. 824) and also restrict the forms of ID accepted for voter registration (S.B. 747). Both have increased the likelihood of young North Carolinians living on college campuses casting a provisional ballot and then having their ballots subsequently rejected.

Additional research must be conducted on statewide provisional balloting to further understand the political and legal impacts on the rights of youth voters at Duke and across the state. 

Learn more about provisional balloting and the research that will inform this team’s work by reading:

• Provisional Rights and Provisional Ballots in a Swing State: Understanding How and Why North Carolina College Students Lose Their Right to Vote, 2008-Present
• The State of Voting Rights at Duke University, June 2024

Project Description

Using publicly available data through the North Carolina State Board of Elections, this project team will conduct diagnostic research to identify the full nature and extent of youth disfranchisement across North Carolina over the past several election cycles. Team members from Duke and NCCU will aim to identify and isolate the varied factors – campus gerrymanders, lack of access to early voting sites, misinformation and legal barriers – that compromise students’ voting rights and pilot potential solutions that will reduce the pervasive barriers that inhibit youth voters from realizing their potential political power.

This work will builds on survey data collected in April 2024 from students at Duke, NCCU, Appalachian State, UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University and UNC-Pembroke. Using the same protocol, team members will expand the study to include four additional college campuses across the state: Eastern Carolina University, North Carolina A&T, UNC-Greensboro and UNC-Charlotte. Team members will survey all registered youth voters in the campus precincts of each school (a cohort of roughly 24,000 registered voters) and will interview provisional balloters from each campus.

Anticipated Outputs

White papers on how to minimize provisional balloting on each college campus; non-partisan op-eds explaining the risks to student voting and how to avoid them; website and digitized stories by student voters on the provisional balloting process; participation in statewide forums on the youth vote

Student Opportunities

Ideally, this team will include 4 graduate/professional students and 15 undergraduate students from Duke and NCCU with interests in data science, political science, public policy, statistics and/or sociology.

Team members will be involved in the entirety of the research process and will learn how to ask ethically significant and impactful questions; work with complex data sets and interview peers; present findings to peers and voting rights advocates; and publish research in a timely and accessible fashion.  

In Fall 2024, the team will meet on Thursdays from 5:00-6:30 to discuss research design and progress and will likely break into subteams of 2-3 students to complete deeper dives into research data and findings.

Timing

Fall 2024 – Spring 2025

•    Fall 2024: Design and implement pilot projects that address fall election challenges across several campuses in North Carolina

•    Spring 2025: Research efficacy of pilot projects in light of voting returns; present research; begin writing up findings for publication

Crediting

Academic credit available for fall and spring semesters

See earlier related team, Elections in a Pandemic: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (2021-2022).