NYSBOE releases voter registration tallies from campuses without polling sites

ALBANY, N.Y. (NEXSTAR) — On Tuesday, October 15, the New York State Board of Elections (BOE) released a tally of voter registrations at 20 colleges that don’t have polling sites. This in response to a letter from a coalition pushing for more polling sites to make the voting process more accessible.

The Youth Vote Coalition that wrote the letter highlighted those same schools, all four-year residential campuses with over 1,000 full-time students. They theorized that large student populations would reasonably correlate to having 300 or more registered voters among the respective student bodies. If so, it would mean that New York law requires polling sites on these campus.

But “Our data indicates that many students do not register at their dormitory or other college campus address, and instead opt to remain registered at home,” reads the letter signed by BOE Co-Executive Directors Kristen Zebrowski Stavisky and Raymond J. Riley, III. “While the campuses included may have thousands of students, it is a smaller subset of those students who are registered voters, and an even smaller subset of students who are registered voters at addresses on the college campus.”

BOE had already made this point, but this time, they broke down the voter rolls on a school-by-school basis. Their analysis revealed measley amonuts of registered voters at all 20 schools:

“We are shocked by the tiny numbers of registered college students,” said Blair Horner, the Executive Director of the New York Public Interest Group (NYPIRG). “If the numbers are accurate, it raises serious questions about the voter registration process on these campuses.”

In New York, students still have time to register to vote, using either a campus or a home address. But even if 300 or more students register at one of these 20 schools to trigger the state requirement, it is too late to scout for and set up a new polling site. That’s because the law requires that polling places be set by March 15.

New Yorkers must register to vote by October 26 either online, by mail, or in-person at a local election office. That’s also the deadline for the BOE to receive requests for an absentee ballot, so make sure to take enough time if relying on the mail. If mailed back, make sure your absentee ballot is postmarked by November 5.

The BOE emphasized that voters have many options to make voting easy in 2024. Once registered, New Yorkers can perform their civic duty through early mail-in voting, absentee voting, early in-person voting that lasts from October 26 to November 3, and in-person voting on Election Day, November 5.

The coalition comprised representatives from the NYPIRG, New York’s League of Women Voters, Common Cause New York, the Bard Center for Civic Engagement, Reinvent Albany, Citizens Union, and the Andrew Goodman Foundation.

Take a look at at the BOE letter below:

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