Do the vast majority of colleges in New York state lack on-site voting?

Legislation enacted by New York state in 2022 requires most colleges and universities in the state to establish voting sites on or near campus. But a Bard College official who tracks the issue recently warned university presidents that little progress had been made on turning this mandate into reality.

In a February open letter to New York state’s college presidents, Jonathan Becker, vice president for academic affairs at Bard College and director of the Hudson Valley college’s Center for Civic Engagement, urged colleges to create polling locations on or near campus if they don’t exist already.

"Unfortunately, as two recent studies show, state and local election administrators have not adequately prioritized or fully implemented this critical voter protection legislation," Becker wrote. "The vast majority of colleges in New York state do not have on-campus poll sites and there has been almost no change since the passage of this legislation."

The two studies Becker cited show many college campuses in New York state lack voting sites. There’s statistical uncertainty about how many of these campuses would be covered by the law’s voting site requirements.

Becker and other campus voting experts have long complained that boards of election, in New York state and elsewhere, have often imposed strict residency requirements and made voting sites inaccessible.

Bard — along with the Andrew Goodman Foundation, a New York City-based voting rights group named for one of the three voter-registration volunteers murdered in Mississippi in 1964 — has been involved in the issue for years, filing lawsuits in 2020 and 2021 to bring a polling place to campus.

"I think a lot of students don't know that they can register to vote at their campus address," said Caroline Smith, the Andrew Goodman Foundation’s programs director. "I think this is a major reason why students tend to vote absentee" in their home state rather than where they attend school.

The lawsuits prompted the inclusion of a provision in New York state’s 2023 budget that required colleges and universities with more than 300 registered voters on campus to have an on-campus polling location or one near the campus that was approved in coordination with the university. Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the budgetary legislation that included the provision in April 2022.

Becker told PolitiFact that both students and faculty members living on campus count toward the 300-voter threshold. The legislation also prevented campuses from being divided into multiple voting districts.

Becker cited two studies showing that progress on applying the law has been incomplete. 

One study, published in February 2024 by Becker’s Center for Civic Engagement, found that almost half of New York’s 41 four-year public institutions with more than 1,000 students had regular or early voting sites. Twenty public universities had a polling location, and 21 did not. 

Four-year public institutions with on-campus polling sites included Binghamton University, Brooklyn College, Stony Brook University and University at Albany. Those that did not included the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the University at Buffalo. 

The rate of on-campus voting sites was lower for the 64 private institutions with more than 600 undergraduates, at 22%. Sixteen private universities had a polling location; 48 did not. 

Private institutions with on-campus polling sites included Bard, Cornell University, New York University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Skidmore College, Syracuse University, Vassar College and Yeshiva University. Private institutions that did not have an on-campus site included Barnard College, Colgate University, Columbia College, Fordham University, Hamilton College, Hofstra University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, St. Bonaventure University, St. John’s University and the University of Rochester.

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A team from Rutgers Law School led by Yael Bromberg, a professor there, conducted the other study, which found a "minor increase (2.2%) in the presence of on-campus poll sites between the 2018 and 2022 elections, when the law came into effect."

The study cautioned that some information was difficult to secure. 

Many boards of elections "do not have information on poll site locations on their websites, and those that do often do not indicate if the poll sites are on a college campus," the study said. "Calls to boards of election often went unanswered. When interviewers did speak to board representatives and requested basic public information, such as whether a poll site is situated on a college campus, answers were often withheld until a Freedom of Information Act request was filed. Even then, Freedom of Information Act requests often went unanswered."

However, the study was able to use two other methods to determine whether campuses had a voting site: a survey of college administrators and cross-checking poll site addresses provided by boards of election.

As a result, Becker said the study provides solid math on whether a college has a campus voting site.

Another factor, however, involves some uncertainty. The researchers often couldn’t confirm the number of registered voters on campus. So, they used a workaround to make an estimate: They looked at colleges with 1,000 students and assumed that it was plausible that 300 of them could be registered voters who lived on campus. 

"We're listing places which could meet the requirements," Becker said. "We have no idea; that's part of the whole story."

So while the study supports the notion that 36 four-year campuses had voting sites and 69 did not, or just under two-thirds, it is unable to say with certainty how many of these institutions have the minimum 300 registered voters on campus to trigger the law’s requirements. That’s an important distinction within the context of a letter designed to encourage adherence to the 2022 law.

The Andrew Goodman Foundation’s Smith said such obstacles demand action from college presidents.

"Administrations will often focus on what’s being brought to their attention," said Smith. "I think securing on-campus polling sites requires the active support and leadership of campus administration."

Becker said "the vast majority of colleges in New York State do not have on-campus poll sites." 

Two studies, one of them by his own group, support the idea that a little under two-thirds of four-year New York State colleges lack a campus voting site.

However, the difficulty of obtaining information about registered voters on campus makes it unclear how many of the campuses studied would be covered by the law.

The statement is accurate but needs additional information. We rate it Mostly True.

CORRECTION NOTE, April 9 and 10, 2024: After publication, we updated this story. We first corrected our reporting to show that statistical uncertainties in the Bard study pertain to whether campuses are covered by the on-campus voting site law from 2022, not to whether the school has an on-campus voting site. We updated the rating of this fact-check from Half True to Mostly True. On April 10, we clarified more language in our fact-check about our rating scope and corrected a reference to a study's findings on election boards' websites.