In the November election, the youth vote was poised to be one of the most crucial blocks in the state. But voting rights advocates worried students would struggle with the state’s new voter ID laws, among other issues that can keep young people from casting ballots.
Those questions about the student vote sparked the creation of the Student Voting Rights Lab, a joint class of students at Duke University and North Carolina Central University examining provisional ballots and barriers for student voters in the state.
Provisional ballots, a last resort for voters when their eligibility is in question, can help decide elections in North Carolina.
Take the state Supreme Court race: While Republican Jefferson Griffin led Democrat Allison Riggs by more than 10,000 votes as ballots were still being counted on election night, Riggs was ahead once officials finished tallying provisional and mail-in absentee ballots.
Some kinds of provisional ballots can be “cured,” or fixed so that they count, such as by presenting photo ID if the voter didn’t have it at the polling place. But more than half of those ballots are ultimately thrown out in North Carolina.
Research conducted at Duke found that voters aged 18 to 25 cast provisional ballots at a rate nearly three times higher than all North Carolina voters in the 2020 election. The rejection rate of those ballots was even higher, at almost 80 percent compared to the statewide average of about 60.
“If you think about the ripple effect of how this works, the harm is much bigger than the actual, literal number of ballots that are thrown,” said Gunther Peck, a Duke professor who is one of the lab’s leaders. “A lot of young people are discouraged or feeling discouraged about voting, even though their votes are probably the most critical in determining the outcome of literally every state race, as well as the presidency itself.”
After weeks of data-crunching, here is what the lab learned about the 2024 election and young voters.
Youth Turnout Dropped
Across the state, turnout by voters aged 18 to 25 dropped from more than 60 percent in 2020 to about 53 percent in 2024. The total number of registrations in the state also dropped, which Peck said indicates an even larger decrease in the youth vote.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, a higher percentage of registered voters cast ballots, but the number of votes at the campus precinct fell from just over 9,000 in 2016 to roughly 5,700 in 2024.
The student turnout at Durham universities was a bright spot. Duke had its highest-recorded turnout, with more than 4,300 votes in 2024 at its campus-area precincts, up from about 3,500 in 2020 and about 4,200 in 2016. At NCCU-area precincts, turnout soared from just over 1,000 votes in 2020 to nearly 2,000 this year—the most ballots cast there since 2012.
While the number of provisional ballots cast by all voters in the state grew by 25,000 compared with 2020, the number of provisional ballots among youth voters dropped slightly. An estimated 9,000 voters aged 18 to 25 cast provisional ballots this year, compared with 10,577 youth voters in the 2020 election, according to research conducted by Duke.
“The disparity between youth and the general electorate got smaller,” Peck said. “That’s not a good thing,” he added, pointing out that more provisionals were cast and thrown across the state. In all, more than 40,000 provisional ballots were rejected this cycle.
Students’ provisional ballots appeared more likely to be thrown out than other voters’, Peck said. Among the 23 colleges in the state with the most registered student voters, the so-called throw rate was nearly 66 percent, the lab found, compared with the statewide average of around 62 percent.
The difference is even more pronounced on certain campuses, according to the lab. At NCCU, 81 out of 95 provisional ballots cast at the main campus precinct were tossed out—representing 4.8 percent of all ballots cast there. At UNC-CH, 57 out of 64 provisional ballots were disqualified at the main campus precinct, about 1 percent of all ballots.
Candidate Challenges Youth Votes
Griffin questioned some of those student votes when he challenged more than 60,000 ballots in the state Supreme Court race, arguing they were marred by fraud or irregularities.
For every ballot cast by someone 66 years or older that was included in Griffin’s challenge, there were three ballots from youth voters, the lab found.
Durham was the most targeted metropolitan county and had the highest youth challenge rate in the state. Nearly 7 percent of Durham’s youth vote was included, compared to just over 1 percent of Durham voters 66 or older.
The two precincts for Duke’s campus and the main NCCU campus precinct were the top three Durham County precincts where Griffin challenged ballots. His campaign questioned 404 Duke students’ votes and those of 250 NCCU students.
The State Board of Elections threw out Griffin’s challenge on Wednesday, though he could appeal the decision.
The Lab’s Impact
The Student Voting Rights Lab and other groups’ efforts to educate students on how to avoid casting provisional ballots leading up to the election were likely part of the reason young people cast fewer votes that way this cycle, Peck told The Assembly.
The class sent more than 100,000 emails to recently registered students across the state about provisional ballots, and small groups of students in the class organized other campaigns tailored to specific kinds of barriers.
One group sent messages to students in Western North Carolina about how to vote absentee, encouraging them to “not let Helene take away their voting rights.” Another focused on reaching out to students whose registrations were canceled when the state couldn’t send a verification card to their listed address. A different team created social media content and crafted text messages for students studying abroad to let them know they could vote via absentee ballot online.
The impact of the lab was certainly felt at NCCU after one of its students, Alexis Staten, noticed that the university’s student ID photos were often blurry, faded, or scratched off entirely—including her own. That set off alarm bells for Staten, and she wondered whether her ID could be rejected, meaning she’d have to cast a provisional ballot. The lab asked the county board whether the faded NCCU ID would be a valid form of photo ID, and their suspicions were confirmed.
Staten and the other students brought the issue to NCCU administrators, who sent messages to students about how to get new IDs ahead of the election. The university offered to print the IDs at no cost to students.
“Even if I had the chance to help one student, I did, so that’s just a great feeling,” Staten said. Still, if any students didn’t know about the ID initiative and ended up having their votes tossed, “that sometimes keeps me up at night,” she said.
About the data: The Student Voting Rights Lab’s analysis of youth voting was derived from voter registration files at the county and precinct levels. The provisional ballot rates for voters age 18 to 25 came from designated precincts that include campuses. The lab will have a more precise picture after it has compiled student enrollments statewide in those particular precincts.
Erin Gretzinger is a higher education reporter at The Assembly. She was previously a reporting fellow at The Chronicle of Higher Education and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You can reach her at erin@theassemblync.com.