While voter turnout was high in Luzerne County and Pennsylvania for the 2024 election, the young voter turnout in Pennsylvania and at Misericordia may not have been as impressive.

According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, as of Oct. 30, a week before the election, there were 6% fewer registered voters ages 18-29 in the state than there were in 2020. The decline was also evident in registered new voters ages 18-19, which saw a 9% drop since 2020.

Confusion and lack of knowledge about the voting process may have played a role in the decline, particularly with young college students. According to Sarah Lynn, freshman mass communications major, the voting registration protocol was confusing to the point that she sought help from home.

“When I first registered to vote, obviously my mom helped me with that,” she said.

Lynn’s process was complicated because she lives on campus but was still listed as a resident of Cumberland County in South Central Pennsylvania. Lynn originally registered to vote at her polling station in Cumberland County.

“We thought I would be able to come home in time to [vote] there, but it ended up not working out that way,” she explained. “I didn’t realize that I would have to change my address to be able to vote in Anderson, and the school didn’t really [say] anything about that. I didn’t get any information about voting, which I thought was weird,” she said.

Lynn ended up changing her residency to her campus address prior to the election, which allowed her to vote at Anderson Sports and Health Center. She said without her mom’s guidance, she would never have known that was necessary.

“The only reason I was able to vote in Anderson was because my mom was like ‘Hey, we need to change your voting address or you aren’t going to able to vote,’ so through my mom was the only reason I was able to vote, pretty much.”

To cast a vote in the Anderson polling place, students must become residents of Luzerne County and change their official mailing address to their campus address. Students who remain residents of other counties either have to go back home to vote at their assigned polling station, or they must request an absentee or no-excuse mail-in ballot.

The law in Pennsylvania changed in 2019, due to concerns of the safety of in-person voting during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Before the 2019 change, residents of Pennsylvania who were in a different location than their assigned polling station would need an excuse as to why they could not vote in person. After the 2019 change, any resident of Pennsylvania can request a mail-in ballot without a reason why. Misericordia students who are out of state residents either have to go home to vote or investigate their home states’ laws regarding mail-in and absentee ballots.

Lynn is thankful for her mother’s help, but she is also aware that other students may not have the same parental guidance. Prior to the election, Lynn had a conversation with her suitemates about voting.

“My suitemates [said], ‘Oh yeah.  I’ll probably go vote,’ and I said, ‘Are you registered?’ and they said, ‘I don’t know’. They said they [didn’t] know how to do this because their parents never talked to them about it. So, I had to help them.”

Lynn also believes it would have been easier and less confusing for students to vote if the public voting drop box at Passan Hall were operational for the election. University officials did not offer the drop box for the community as it had in elections past due to new Luzerne County regulations requiring the unit to be drilled into the floor, an action officials would not take in light of the newly renovated floor.

A friend of Lynn’s was told by a poll worker on election day that she had to drop off her mail-in ballot in person because it needed to be in by the time polls closed. Lynn said her friend ended up not voting due to the inconvenience of having to get to Wilkes-Barre on the day of the election, but likely would have dropped it off at Passan Hall if that were an option.

“Yeah probably, but we don’t have cars, so getting [to Wilkes-Barre] is difficult,” Lynn said.

Matthew Albrecht, Student Government Association President, believes many students on campus have a lack of knowledge about the voting process, but he thinks desire might be the bigger overall problem.

“No, I don’t think the majority of students at Misericordia are politically active. I think it’s apathy. Apathy is such a sad reality among youth. If you look back at voting history, that’s nothing new. Young people don’t vote because they don’t see it directly affecting them,” Albrecht said. “It is a little sad, especially with student loans and student loan forgiveness. Politics, as much as we don’t like to think about it, it is so invasive in our lives.”

Like Lynn, Albrecht was also surprised by the absence of messaging from university staffers and wishes they would have been more involved.

“I think it was actually very disappointing to see the lack [of action] from the University. It largely fell to club presidents and clubs to help students register to vote,” he said. “We have screens everywhere, I would have liked to have seen exact resources [on the screens] to send people to, but we didn’t really get a lot of that,” he said.

He said the Campus Life department held one informational event. “They did an ice cream registration, but one event is not doing anything,” he said.

Albrecht said he wishes the SGA was able to do more to help, but they ran into issues with sponsoring events with political candidates on campus. Since Misericordia receives federal funding, it is not allowed to take a stance on political candidates, and it could risk losing federal funding if it had a sponsored event on campus featuring a candidate without providing equal opportunity for the opposing candidates. According to Albrecht, the SGA is looking at ways to help students more in future elections and is open to suggestions. One idea SGA has talked about that would aim to increase interest and knowledge in voting is to have club elections on the same day as the primary election, which Albrecht said might encourage students to vote in the off- year primary by raising awareness and going through the voting process with students.

Although Lynn agrees that apathy is an issue, she believes students’ lack of involvement in elections might be a result of ignorance.

“Especially in our generation, if we don’t have a push to go do something, a lot of us aren’t going to do it. I know with myself, I was too scared to ask anyone to help me figure [it] out,” she explained.

Lynn also believes that her secondary education experience did her no favors in learning the election and voting process.

“Even in my high school, we were never taught what the electoral college is. I didn’t even realize you could not win the popular vote but still win the election,” she said. “I only learned all of this election stuff this year because my mom was like, ‘You need to know this.” I was never taught in high school, and there was nothing [from Misericordia],” Lynn said.

She said the smallest actions could spark students to vote. “Even just a reminder like, ‘Hey, today make sure you go out and vote.’  There wasn’t even that, which is not something that’s hard for [Misericordia] to do,” she said.

Lynn said it is particularly important for higher education institutions to implement basic instruction to their students on civics. “Yes, especially because everyone is going to have different experiences and different knowledge about voting. My parents were on it, but a lot of people don’t have that. They don’t have parents who have pushed voting and have talked about it with them,” she said.

She added that it’s even more convenient to vote with the polling station on campus. “I think it’s a big part of the University’s role to make sure students are actually able to use that resource,” she said.

Lynn said she enjoyed her first voting experience overall but wishes that Misericordia would have helped perhaps by making the voting process a topic of the First Year Experience class.

“In the FYE class, I really thought they were going to say something about voting because our last class was right before we had to vote. They didn’t even say, ‘Hey, make sure you guys go vote.’ There wasn’t even that,” she said.

Lynn said she included the issue of voter education in her evaluation of her First Year Experience class.  “I said, ‘In the future, I would appreciate if you could talk about voting [in FYE] or even just the school in general,’” she said.

Dr. David Rehm, Vice President of Academic Affairs, agrees with Lynn that secondary education is failing a lot of students by not including more civic instruction in their curriculum.

“I think times have changed. I think 10 years ago, even 20years ago, students would have gotten much this in high school. We’re seeing very different levels of preparation from students coming to college in the last several years, and I think the kind of civic knowledge just about how to vote is not an unimportant part of that,” he explained. “So, I think what it means is colleges and universities, and here at Misericordia, we’re going to need to think about that,” he said.

Rehm said he would be open to considering ways to incorporate elections and voting education in FYE classes.

“Yes, and we are in the process of beginning discussions about what’s exactly in FYE and why. I think there are moments now where students find it less than fully engaging and it’s on us to figure out how we do this better,” he said.

Although Rehm is open to reflecting on ways to incorporate fundamental civic instruction in FYE classes, he is also aware that a challenge could be student interest during non-presidential election years.

“I think one of the challenges is we get presidential elections every four years and that’s where you get most of the people voting. So, to introduce this every year in something like FYE, which I’m not opposed to at one level, but half of the time students are going to say, ‘What for? There’s nothing for me to vote for,’”  he explained.

One of the ways Rehm thinks FYE could create interest on a yearly basis is by explaining how elections directly affect students.

“To come up with controversial and also non-controversial examples would be important. There’re things like allocation of highway money. When you’re sitting on 81 in the summer, that’s because someone in Harrisburg decided that section was going to be repaved,” he explained. “These don’t have to always be sensitive things; they can just be facts of the matter.”

Amy Kline, Director of the Student Success Center, is in charge of overseeing FYE classes. Like Rehm, Kline is open to considering adding fundamental civic instruction in FYE classes in the future.

“Of course, yes. I think that would be something I would definitely want to collaborate with others on campus, particularly the political science department and the history department, so that we can come up with a curriculum…I would want to consult with experts; I wouldn’t just want to come up with something myself,” she said.

Kline said it would be important to train FYE instructors to make sure the material is relayed properly.

“We would want to make sure the way that it is presented would be extremely unbiased. We really don’t want to use FYE as a platform for any sort of political agenda,” she said.

Aside from the challenge of presenting the material in an unbiased manner, Kline doesn’t believe there would be any other major challenges to incorporating voting education into FYE classes.

““No, I don’t think there would be any negatives to it if it is thoughtfully put together, and I don’t think there would be push back from anybody at all,” she said.

Kline agrees with Rehm that it would be important to review many different voting scenarios with students.

“I think that could be included and maybe should be included, because as we look to diversify our student population, particularly with the new sports programs, we are getting students from states we have never gotten before,” she explained. “So, obviously with the change in our student population we have to change with the times as well and we can’t except a cookie cutter one size fits all approach because not everybody is from Pennsylvania and definitely not just from Luzerne County,” she said.

Kline believes discussion about how voting directly affects students would be a natural fit in FYE classes.

“We have a really great poverty simulation we do in FYE that really hits home the idea of food insecurity. So, I think without being political, we can tie that stuff in to show how voting impacts these certain areas,” she said.

Kline added that higher education institutions have an important role in educating students to be civic minded.

“I think since one of our main goals is graduating global citizens, I would think that the goal would be to educate them on what be considered a civic duty, which would be voting,” she said. “So, in a very objective manner, going through the process of registering to vote, how to vote, how to do an absentee ballot, [and] what the deadlines are for those. I think it can definitely be an educational opportunity without being biased,” she said.

Rehm also feels higher education institutions must adjust because secondary education has been less effective in preparing students in general, let alone in civic responsibility,

“We can’t assume nearly as much on the knowledge side or skills side that we could in 2015, 2005, 1995. It’s a different world, and we fail to adapt at our peril,” he Rehm said.