To vote in the 2024 election, Lia Symer remembers checking in at her polling place with her student ID card.
"I tend to not carry my driver's license on my person when I'm walking around campus. Most students just carry their student IDs to get into buildings," says Symer, who's about to start her senior year at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire — one of about three dozen states with in-person voter ID laws.
But to cast a ballot this year, Symer is going to need to show a state ID, U.S. passport or another accepted identification now that New Hampshire has become the latest of several states to ban registered voters from using a student ID to verify their identity at the polls.
Weeks before New Hampshire's student ID ban began in June, a federal appeals court put a similar Indiana law back into effect in April. And earlier that same month, Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into a law an upcoming ban on accepting student IDs when checking in voters at the polls. Florida's restriction is set to start in 2027.
Those state laws come amid President Trump's so-far failed push for a Republican plan to overhaul voting in federal elections in every state, including a proposal that would not allow in-person voters to use student IDs.
New Hampshire's legislature passed its student ID ban as part of a slate of bills "adding security and transparency" to the state's elections, as the House Republican caucus put it.
But this month, the Coalition for Open Democracy, a voter advocacy group, filed a lawsuit, arguing the New Hampshire law is unconstitutional for burdening eligible students' right to vote and discriminating against younger voters for their age.
While the legal fights over the bans in New Hampshire and Indiana continue, voting rights advocates are adding another item to their agenda ahead of this fall's midterm election — helping students navigate these latest hurdles to the ballot box for the U.S. voting-age group that's least likely to vote.
Student IDs have long been a focus of voting restrictions
While some states ban any student ID for voting, others allow certain kinds to be used depending on what school issues them, for example, or whether they show a photo or address.
In North Carolina, for instance, colleges and universities must get approval from the state's board of elections before their student IDs can be accepted as voter ID. And in Georgia, only student IDs from public institutions are allowed, leaving out seven of the state's 10 historically Black colleges and universities, including Morehouse and Spelman Colleges.
The intricacies of state voter ID laws, student voting advocates point out, can trip up many of the country's least experienced voters.
"Student IDs have been a source of attempts at controlling who votes on the part of legislators who want to manipulate the process, and that's not necessarily new," says Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director at Fair Elections Center, a voting rights group. "I think there's been, this year, an additional wave of that happening. What this really is, is a power grab of legislators saying that they don't want students to vote."
Supporters of the newest state bans on student IDs for voting argue these kinds of rules promote election security.
In Indiana, attorneys for Republican state officials defending the state's ban in court argued that it's needed to increase public confidence and streamline the photo ID requirement "to make the acceptable forms of identification more uniform, objective, and verifiable."
"The last thing I want to do is to keep people from voting," the sponsor of Indiana's student ID ban, Republican state Sen. Blake Doriot, said at a January hearing on the legislation. "The first thing I want to do is to keep people from voting who shouldn't be voting, who do not have the proper ID."
It's not clear how many voters have used their student IDs to check in at polling places, where local election officials generally don't keep a record of what type of identification voters present.
And there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud involving student IDs.
That lack of proof led a federal judge to conclude that Indiana's ban "looks more like a solution in search of a problem" in an April ruling that found the state law is likely unconstitutional after the voter advocacy group Count US IN sued.
U.S. District Judge Richard Young, a nominee of former President Bill Clinton, wrote that by no longer allowing student IDs as voter ID, Indiana officials "selectively excluded a form of identification that otherwise complies with the neutral criteria established by Indiana's voter ID law and that has been accepted as a form of voter identification for nearly two decades."
Young's ruling is now paused and under review by a panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
"It's just taking away an avenue for participation in our democracy"
In states that have stopped allowing student IDs at the polls, some younger voters are left with having to get a state ID, such as a driver's license. But what earlier generations may consider a rite of passage into adulthood is becoming less common.
"Young people are much less likely to obtain a driver's license, more broadly speaking, than in prior generations. Some of that is because of ride-sharing, financial issues and just their life circumstances," Kanter Cohen of Fair Elections Center says.
And getting ahold of supporting documents needed when applying for a state ID, such as a birth or naturalization certificate or U.S. passport, can be complicated for some students, says Kristen Rodriguez, a Florida-based organizer for VoteRiders, an advocacy group that helps eligible people obtain IDs so they can cast ballots.
"It takes a lot of time to get those documents. And in some states. a birth certificate takes six to eight months to come," Rodriguez notes. "It's usually a series of unfortunate events that lead someone to be without the documents that they need. And it can be as simple as things getting lost in the mail. When I was in college, I moved five times in four years. In all of those moves, it's so easy to lose something."
With Florida's student ID ban not going into effect until next year, Rodriguez sees an opportunity now to encourage eligible students to consider bringing any documents they do have to campus so VoteRiders can help them get a Florida ID.
"It's about really making sure that as many people know this as possible, as early as possible, so that we have enough time to get all of those documents in place before any sort of voting, registration deadlines," Rodriguez adds.
In New Hampshire, a student civics group that Symer, the Dartmouth senior, helps lead is trying to come up with new ways of informing eligible voters on campus about the state's student ID ban — a change that Symer notes also affects high schoolers who are eligible to vote.
"It doesn't only apply to college students. You could also have used a high school student ID to vote in the past," Symer says. "It's just taking away an avenue for participation in our democracy."
And in a state where student interest in elections has often been spurred by New Hampshire's role as a key campaign stop in federal races, Will Nelson, another fourth-year student who is co-president of Dartmouth Civics Association, says he's concerned the student ID ban could have long-lasting ripple effects.
"College is a very formative time for young minds and the civic traditions that you pick up. And we certainly hope that as many of our peers as possible will be lifelong voters for whomever they choose to vote," Nelson adds. "We're just sad to see that some of our policymakers have decided to make it a little bit more difficult for us to participate in that storied tradition."
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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