Absentee ballot issues force some students to drive hours

By Monday, Genevieve Carpenter, a first-year student from the suburbs of Kansas City, Mo., who attends the University of Arkansas, still hadn’t received her mail-in ballot for Tuesday’s general election. So her father, Shannon, jumped into action.

“She filled out the paperwork [to request a mail-in ballot], she got it notarized, she sent it off. Friends around her got theirs, but hers never showed up,” he said, speaking with Inside Higher Ed over the phone Tuesday afternoon. “So, rather than worry about it, we waited till yesterday, and I was like, ‘Screw it. I’ll just come get you.’”

Shannon got in his car, drove three and a half hours to Fayetteville to pick up Genevieve, brought her back to the polls in Missouri to vote in person and then returned her to campus—all on Election Day. He had initially wanted to set out for Fayetteville on Monday, but tornadoes in the region interrupted his plan.

By the time he returned his daughter to her dorm, it was midnight; he had been in the car for about 12 hours all told. He decided to stay in a hotel before heading home the next morning.

Genevieve Carpenter isn’t the only registered voter who requested but didn’t receive a mail-in ballot this election; throughout the day Monday and Tuesday, confused voters in various states reported troubles with absentee voting. Some never received the ballots they asked for, or received them too late. (Some states require that mail-in ballots arrive by the time polls close in order to be counted.) Others submitted their ballots but found they were rejected or never arrived.

Theresa J. Lee, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, is currently representing voters in Cobb County, Ga., whose absentee ballots were never delivered because of an error by the county. But she said there is no reason to believe anecdotes from elsewhere in the country are connected to Cobb County’s issues or are otherwise part of a systemic issue.

“In general, there’s always been not-mal-intentioned election administration hiccups,” she said.

Issues with absentee voting can have an especially strong impact on college students. About a third of students who responded to an Inside Higher Ed/Generation Lab flash poll conducted in late September said they were planning to vote absentee or by mail. That share is even larger—45 percent—among students who go to college in a different voting district than their permanent address.

Shannon Carpenter said he was willing to drive hours to help his daughter vote because he feels strongly that people should exercise their right to vote—something he has worked to instill in his children by taking them to the polls every election since their birth.

He acknowledged that the journey was not only time-intensive and tiring, but also costly; he spent money on gas and the hotel he stayed in Tuesday night, as well as on meals.

“There’s a real financial cost to this that I understand a lot of people, a lot of college students, can’t pay to get this done. That is concerning for something that should be free and easy to do,” he said.

But he was also grateful to spend time with his daughter and son, who accompanied him on the road trip. The siblings, who hadn’t seen each other in a while, spent the lengthy car ride catching up and debating silly hypotheticals, like what their last meal on Earth would be.

“It is a joy to listen to,” he said. “They’re being a family, and I did that, and I’m proud of what I’ve done.”

Elsewhere across the country, students reported lengthy drives—and, in some cases, flights—to their home states to cast ballots. Several news outlets reported that Lexi Harder, a graduate student in Germany who hails from Montgomery County in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, flew 15 hours to vote after her ballot was unexpectedly returned to her.

“It’s definitely priceless. I would have paid triple that to come back,” Harder told 6 ABC.

Others opted to vote in person where they attend college once it became clear their ballots weren’t coming, using a provisional ballot or same-day registration to make the last-minute switch. Mya Tolbert, a student and first-time voter at Towson University, told Inside Higher Ed on Election Day that she decided to vote in person at the university’s campus polling site when her absentee ballot failed to come in the mail. Luckily, she had a gap between classes, so she could stand in line for over an hour.