With 57.7% of its students coming from out of state, The University of Alabama is no stranger to assisting those not from the Yellowhammer state. However, when it comes to election season, students not registered to vote in Tuscaloosa County will have to either travel home to vote or submit an absentee ballot to vote in their home county or state.
In an election season like 2024, the race could be left up to a few key states to decide the winner.
Politico columnist Jonathan Martin argued that three states will decide the 2024 election outcome: Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
This year, The University of Alabama has 2,920 students from Georgia, 851 from North Carolina and 769 from Pennsylvania.
With this large number of students from battleground states, absentee voting has the potential to highly influence the presidential election.
Because of differing laws between states, students have had differing experiences in registering for absentee ballots. Some have said how easy it was, while others have not had the same positive experience.
Brendan Manning, freshman business major from North Carolina, said registering for an absentee ballot was “actually really easy to do.” He did it in early August, before school started.
In North Carolina, absentee ballots do not have to be requested until Oct. 29, but they must be received by mail on Election Day, Nov. 5.
Addison Bailey, a freshman criminal justice major from Georgia, also said she had a smooth experience with registering for an absentee ballot. This will be Bailey’s first time voting in any election.
“I think it is streamlined pretty well,” Bailey said. “It wasn’t too confusing for me and I didn’t have to ask for help or anything. I would say it would be more convenient if it were online, like the request for the ballot is, but I also know how that could have problems.”
Enrijeta Shino, assistant professor of American politics, said that while voting absentee is convenient, it can cause troubles for young voters, such as their ballot being invalidated and not counting.
“There are many checks in the process to make sure only valid ballots are being counted,” Shino said.
Shino said that one of these checks is signature matching. The signature on the absentee ballot must match the signature that is on file for the person voting. This is often checked by comparing the signature on the ballot to the one that is used on that person’s voter registration cards.
“Most people, and especially young voters, tend not to have stable signatures,” Shino said, explaining a cause of ballot invalidation.
Another problem that Shino said students may run into while trying to vote absentee is timing. Many states have strict laws on when ballots must be received, and if they are not received by that deadline, they will be invalidated.
Aidan McKeon, a junior majoring in marketing and history who is from New York, said he is still waiting on his ballot registration form to arrive, despite registering weeks before the deadline.
“The process is extremely inefficient,” McKeon said. “First of all, the mail takes forever to get down here because it is still delivered by train. They normally expect it to take a week max, because that is just average for the postal service around New York, but getting it down here takes forever.”
McKeon said that his application was already running a week late and that he wouldn’t be surprised if it took three to four more weeks to get to Alabama.
“It’s concerning because I did this three months in advance,” McKeon said. “If someone were to try to do this now, they might not even get their vote in on time because you still have to mail it back to New York.”
Two years ago, McKeon tried to vote in the midterms, but he was unable to because his ballot never came to him through the UA mail system.
Like Bailey, McKeon thinks absentee voting could be more convenient if voters were able to cast ballots online.
“We’re one of the only countries left in the world that still uses primarily paper voting,” McKeon said.
McKeon said that if there were an app to vote, voter turnout could drastically increase.
Despite the challenges with absentee ballots, Shino said that it is still important for students to vote, no matter what state they live in.
“Students are one of those categories that vote at the lowest rate compared to other age groups,” Shino said. “It is very important for them to exercise their right and shape the government and the country into the country they want it to be.”
