Image: McBee Institute faculty member Tim Cain’s research on efforts to limit college student voting in the 1970s has been published as a “FirstView” article in the History of Education Quarterly; the print version will appear this fall. The article, “‘Isn’t It Terrible That All These Students Are Voting?’: Student Suffrage in College Towns,” demonstrates that college town officials and citizens actively worked to undermine the college student rights in the years after the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18. It does so based on evidence from more than 75 college towns in the years just after the amendment’s ratification. Among other tactics, opponents to the student vote made registration difficult, treated college student voters differently than they treated other voters, limited polling places near campuses, gerrymandered districts, and attempted to schedule elections when they thought students might be away from campus. While most of these efforts were intended to deprive all college students of their voting rights, some were more pernicious. In places like Waller County, Texas, and Fort Valley, Georgia, the efforts were specifically designed to prevent Black college students from voting. The article examines the 1970s but has implications for the 2020s. Cain wrote: “A month after the 26th Amendment passed, a member of the board of registration in the county where Clemson University is located stated, ‘We don’t want to deny anyone the right to vote. Anyone who is a resident of South Carolina may register to vote here—except students.’ That was an important caveat in 1971 and remains so today, amid widespread efforts to disenfranchise students for political gain. Voting rights, seemingly guaranteed in the Constitution, its amendments, and in multiple pieces of legislation, have been and remain contested.” An agreement between the University of Georgia Libraries and Cambridge University Press has allowed for the article to be Open Access. It is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. You can read it at: https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2024.13 Type of News/Audience: Research
