Being in college shouldn’t disenfranchise me from democracy. HR 1 defends voters like me.

It was Election Day 2020.

The polls were closing in an hour, and I saw a group of girls walking along the quad. As a University of New Hampshire student organizer working on my campus to turn out the youth vote, I intercepted them to ask if they had voted yet, but they did not even know where or how to vote. I lit up and urgently walked them through the process: what they needed to bring, where to go, and how to get there.

They got on the next shuttle to vote.

This encounter was replicated hundreds of times earlier in the fall for me and my fellow student organizers from groups like the New Hampshire Young Democrats and NextGen America. I felt a great deal of responsibility, both as an organizer and student senator, to do my part to ensure as many of my fellow students as possible understood how they could exercise their right to vote.

H.R. 1’s college campus outreach

However, the voting process is hardly straightforward, especially for students voting in New Hampshire (we have a higher percentage of college students than any other state and are ground zero in the GOP war on student voting rights). But H.R. 1, the For the People Act, will implement much-needed reforms if passed and signed into law.

The bill mandates online voter registration and more than two weeks of early voting. New Hampshire currently has neither online voter registration nor early voting. H.R.1 requires colleges and universities that receive federal funds to appoint a “campus vote coordinator,” which would improve students’ participation in elections and understanding of facets like vote-by-mail.

Time to take sides: The Georgia Republican Party wants to set voting rights back decades. Is your state next?

H.R.1 also allows young people to pre-register at 16 and 17 years old. As we know, the sooner young people are introduced to voting, the more likely they are to become engaged voters later.

GOP doesn’t support young voters

Young people in New Hampshire also know that, unfortunately, Republicans in our state are not on the side of young voters. Despite promising that he would never suppress the student vote, Gov. Chris Sununu has signed legislation to disenfranchise student voters and vetoed bills seeking to modernize our elections with independent redistricting and lower barriers to registration and the ballot box.

Lily Jackson in Durham, New Hampshire, in February 2021. (Photo: Family handout)

In fact, last spring a judge struck down SB 3, a law that negatively impacted students’ ability to register to vote by requiring them to present proof of residency with documents students may not have. Sununu supported the bill, but the court said it was unconstitutional and unreasonably burdened the right to vote. Of course, students who live in, work in, and contribute to the Granite State should have the same rights as everyone else, but Republicans apparently hold otherwise.

During the latest legislative session, GOP lawmakers unveiled a flurry of new suppression schemes. Among the worst are bills that would ban college IDs from being used as voter IDs, prohibit educational institutions from serving as students’ voter registration addresses, and make it harder for people who live in New Hampshire from voting if they merely maintain an address in another state where they’re eligible to register to vote.

Equal opportunity at risk: Fight voter suppression laws in the states. Let’s not let America regress to Jim Crow.

Thanks to organizing from a coalition including NextGen America, the New Hampshire Young Democrats, New Hampshire Youth Movement, 603 Forward, and 350 NH, we defeated the college ID bill, and the two others are on temporary hold in committee until this fall. But with Republicans unlikely to back off their voter suppression crusade anytime soon, federal intervention is needed.

Young voters matter

The For the People Act would provide a huge assist.

We have so much at stake as young Granite Staters — we’re in debt, we’re dealing with the impacts of climate change and a pandemic. We should have a say in the leadership that represents us, and H.R. 1 gives us the opportunity that every American deserves: the right to accessible, safe, and convenient voting.

For political systems to be representative, all parts of society must be included. When young people are disenfranchised or disengaged from political processes, a significant portion of the population has little or no voice or influence in decisions that affect our lives.

New Hampshire desperately needs young people to stay here after they graduate, and making sure students feel invested in our state’s democracy is an important way to accomplish that. An attack on anyone’s voting right is an attack on everyone’s right to vote.

As an American, I believe in free fair elections. I believe in our democracy. I believe we need to pass H.R.1.

Lily Jackson is a senior at the University of New Hampshire.  

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