With the Help of Online Resources, Out-of-State Students Try to Navigate the Absentee Ballot Process
By Evelyn Hsieh
Joshua Fu was anxious. After sending a paper form and an online form to request an absentee ballot from California, he still wasn’t sure whether he would receive one in time to participate in this year’s historic presidential election.
“They didn’t send a confirmation or anything after I submitted online,” said Fu, 20, a junior at New York University. “I thought, ‘What happens if it didn’t go through? What happens if the two times I did it cancel out?’”
Students such as Fu encounter a variety of rules, deadlines and procedures for absentee voting, leaving many to wonder why the process is not easier.
Though they are part of a technologically savvy generation, students often must navigate pen-and-paper processes to register to vote.
While students can vote in their adopted state or from their home state, the latter option requires filling out a form to request an absentee ballot, sending it by mail, receiving the ballot, and sending it before a deadline that varies by state. In some states, voters can fill out an online form to request a ballot or do the traditional print and mail method.
“It’s kind of a pain in the butt,” said Lauren Vu, 21, who mailed in an absentee ballot to California. “You fill it out online, print it out, and then send it in. Then they send something back to me. Then I send it to them. It’s a back-and-forth process. But it’s not something I can control.”
In New York, absentee ballot applications can be obtained from county election boards or downloaded online from state or county election web sites. The prospective voter has to mail the application for receipt in the county office seven days before the election or deliver by hand the day before Election Day. To be counted, an absentee ballot must be postmarked by the day before Election Day and must reach the Board of Elections no more than seven days after the election.
While each state and county registrar offers information on their respective web sites, non-governmental resources have also sprouted to help students with absentee voting.
One of the research centers at New York University’s law school offers an online guide with detailed explanations of state-by-state voting laws color-coded according to how student friendly the process is — green for most student-friendly, yellow for “proceed with caution” and red for most restrictive.
Tennessee and Michigan are red states: both states require first-time voters to vote in person.
A New Jersey resident and NYU student, Katie Rotondi, 21, used longdistancevoter.org – affiliated with Rock the Vote — to keep informed about absentee voting deadlines and procedures.
“You have a lot going on anyway and it’s a pain,” said Rotondi. “If it were easier I think there’d be more voters, especially young ones.”
At the same time, it is important to keep in mind the difficulty of administering elections, said Doug Chapin, director of the Pew Center for the State’s www.electionline.org site, which publishes election administration research.
“The system is still figuring out how to digest the huge amount of mobility and turnover from across the country,” he said.
Other popular sites include student-run www.beabsentee.org and www.govoteabsentee.org, which exist solely to make the absentee voting process less confusing for young voters. Www.helpingamericavote.org is a free service that allows companies to generate emails about absentee voting deadlines, and www.countmore.org is a clearinghouse of absentee voting information to educate students on their options for voting in swing-states.
In an age in which one can give money at a click of a button, some are surprised that technology hasn’t made make absentee voting easier.
“It’s so easy to donate and you’d think there’d be a circumference effect” on voting processes, said Cody Vichinsky, 21.
Ultimately, students and citizens of all ages have the burden of navigating the logistics in order to vote.
“I know of some people who don’t want to go through all of that,” said Rotondi. “It’s time consuming and just stupid.”
As for Fu, the student who filled out two forms, an absentee ballot did finally show up in his mailbox.
“Anything that the state runs is unnecessarily complicated,” he said. “I got [the ballot] because I was determined to do it. But some people aren’t going to vote because it’s too complicated.”
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