Getting college kids to vote can be a real bitch. Just like with everything else, it takes some elbow grease to overcome the inherent obstacles involved. With any luck, this year will be easier than most but I thought I would offer a few tips for increasing the turnout in your area.
College kids move around a lot. Nearly every freshman moves into a residence hall, frequently from outside the area, and nearly every sophomore moves off campus. The vagaries of roommate and housing situations take care of the rest right up to the people who have graduated and moved away. In addition to making voter rolls near universities notoriously unreliable, actually reaching these people to get them registered and to the polls can just plain suck.
Here are a couple of thoughts from the youth vote registration drives I've been involved with--
Register everyone. It's a good bet that just about anyone you see under the age of 25 is either unregistered or not registered at their current address.
Stick a preprinted post-it to the registration form with have a place for kids to voluntarily put their cell phone and email along with various opt-in options (just a reminder for the election, primary, etc, contact to volunteer, that sort of thing) this helps immensely with phone banking before the election. These days it wouldn't hurt to ask if it's ok to text since sending a few mass texts would be much handier than making that many calls
Make copies of every form before taking it to the elections clerk and enter the information into a database. Again, with technology advancing we used to just pencil in blocks that had been registered, followed up with, etc, but a few minutes with google maps could yield the same results and give some guidance for door to door registration, lit drops and GoTV
Tabling on campus (including wandering around with clipboards and bugging people) is really quite effective but time consuming. Also effective is doing class raps. Many (mostly on our side of the political spectrum) professors will give a few minutes before class to let you hand out registration forms, say a few words about the importance of the election, and then collect the filled out ones. The really nice professors won't mind students scribbling away through class and will collect them for you afterward.
Hope like hell there's a marijuana initiative on the ballot. You don't have to mention it and you don't have to support it, but there's nothing like a pot measure to bring in the first time voters. It kind of feels like cheating, but hey the right gets to fling abortion and gay marriage at their base so fair's fair.
Really the toughest part is getting people to register once you've pinned them down. Generally, the roadblocks are similar to every registration effort, but college kids have a few extra hurdles --
"I'm already registered" -- that's almost always either complete BS, or they don't know that they need to be registered at their current address. Quickly following up with "Are you registered at your current address, here in XXXX County?" will gain at least a few registrations
similarly there's:
"I'm registered at home" -- Unless they're from Alaska, that's also BS and needs to be fixed. Almost nobody makes a trip home to vote or has the foresight to get an absentee ballot mailed to their college address. One effective followup is "Are you going to be there Nov 4th?"
The advantages for college kids registering locally are overwhelming. Here are some of the more effective statements if you have the time to make them:
You should register to vote where you live 9 months out of the year since you'll have a say in the things that will affect you locally
You should register to vote where it's easiest to do your voting-- the place you'll be on election day.
Registering to vote helps establish residency for in-state tuition
Many professors will give extra credit if you have an "I Voted" sticker
Often going to vote can be an excused absence and combining that with early voting can give a nice free day in the middle of the week
Whatever your affiliation, college age people registering and voting creates shockwaves at the state and national level that affect things like financial aid, research funding, and other priorities that generally get slanted toward more consistently powerful electoral groups, like the elderly
College kids are a powerful group electorally, and generally if they can get into the habit of voting it's something they'll carry on for the rest of their lives. It's worth the effort to get them to the polls, especially this year with all of its historic implications. For our side of the political divide, an added bonus is that Obama absolutely electrifies younger people and while we can usually count on more than half of college kids to vote democrat, this year might be even better.
Also, I come from an extremely conservative district with a couple of Democratically leaning college towns. Like many areas with a liberal enclave, the conservative state legislature has gerrymandered several legislative boundaries around so as to dilute the potential Democratic registration advantage with the surrounding rural Republican areas. Imagine that backfiring as hordes of suddenly activated left-leaning college kids overwhelm supposedly safe conservative seats on county boards, in state legislatures, and in Congress. Neat, huh? Combine that with growing progressive strength in rural areas and we're in business.
The strategies that I've outline above are pretty standard, but they do work. One precinct that I worked in 2004 registered over 4000 students, quadrupling its size, making it the largest in the state. On election day, there was a 90% turnout. That was with one paid youth vote organizer who started work in August in a county the size of Rhode Island. Depending on the size of the area, it may only take a few volunteers willing to put in the hours needed to do the registration and subsequent followup and GoTV. With political science departments handing out intern credit to those volunteers... well geez, let's get to it
-----update----
as an FYI, I live in Colorado and did most of this stuff in the odious Marilyn Musgrave's district during her last two squeaker elections so the idea of anybody wanting to be registered elsewhere never once occurred to me.
Obviously, it's a good idea to be armed with info on how folks can get their vote by mail or absentee ballot or grab some contact info to get back to them if necessary. Generally, that's not such a big deal since anyone on the ball enough to follow politics back home kind of know the drill... and should be snagged as a volunteer.