University project shows logistics, not apathy, suppress student voting

Every election cycle brings headlines about the lack of voter participation among 18- to 24- year-olds. The conventional wisdom is that young people are too apathetic or tuned out to vote. But, according to George Mason University research from the 2025 election cycle, that story is wrong.

For the past four years, Jennifer Victor, an associate professor of political science, has led groups of undergraduates at the Schar School of Policy and Government in experiential research activities to discover what actually keeps college students from voting. 

"We surmised it's not that students don't care," said Victor. "Maybe it's that voting is actually hard for them."

During the 2022, 2023, and 2024 elections in Virginia, Victor worked with Schar School students to conduct experiments and surveys to understand the barriers to voting and test ways of overcoming them. One previous finding was that-not unlike their older counterparts-students are more likely to vote when someone they know personally asks them to. 

Victor and her team found that students often juggle multiple addresses, live in temporary housing, and move between states with different rules. Many assume they have to travel home to vote. And when the process feels confusing or inconvenient, participation drops. What happens if those barriers are removed? Victor and her student researchers wanted to find out.

"For the 2025 election, the student volunteers put into practice all the principles I'd learned in the prior studies," Victor said. "But could we really increase turnout during an off-year election with no federal candidates on the ballot? The low salience 2025 election was a good test to see if our methods would work."

Victor said that key to the effort was creating a cross-campus coalition with a leadership team that included staff members from the Offices of University Life and Community Engagement and Civic Learning. Working with a local chapter of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, they recruited and trained more than 60 volunteers who wanted to help their peers vote.

The program, organized as Mason Voting Ambassadors, included formal training in regulations around voter registration, on-campus tabling events, classroom presentations, and an Instagram campaign, as well as broadcast and editorial content produced with Student Media and a website and email hotline for accurate voting information and resources.

After the election, the students analyzed turnout at the university's precinct in Merten Hall, the polling place for on-campus residents. Voter turnout increased.

"The results stunned us," said Victor. "George Mason was the only precinct in all of Fairfax County to see an increase in voter turnout compared to the 2024 presidential election."

Not only that-she said turnout at the polling place was 48 percent higher in 2025. "In a year when turnout typically falls across the state, George Mason moved dramatically in the opposite direction. It seems we did something right."

Their research confirmed that students vote when the barriers to voting are lowered. Making voting understandable, accessible, and relevant can help drive young people to the polls. 

"This is the type of evidence-based social science that students at the Schar School are learning-turning their passions into action and developing the social science tools to shape smarter, more responsive public policy for the world they're inheriting," Victor said.