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Every election cycle brings fresh headlines about the lack of voter participation among 18-to-24 year-olds. The conventional wisdom is that young people are too apathetic or tuned out to vote. But, according to our research from the latest election cycle, that story is wrong.
For the past four years, I’ve led groups of undergraduate students at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University in experiential research activities to dig into what actually keeps college students from voting and testing solutions to fix it.
Maybe, we surmised, it’s not that students don’t care. Maybe it’s that voting is actually hard for them. Students often juggle multiple addresses, live in temporary housing, or move between states with different rules. Many assume they have to travel home to vote. And when the process itself feels confusing or inconvenient? Participation drops.
What happens if we remove those barriers?
During the 2022, 2023, and 2024 elections in Virginia, I worked with Schar School students to undertake experiments and surveys to understand the barriers to voting and test ways of overcoming them. One previous finding was that—not unlike their older counterparts—students are more likely to vote when someone they know personally asks them to.
For 2025, I led a group of 60 volunteer students in campus voter work, putting into practice all the principles I’d learned in the prior studies. But could we really increase turnout during an off-year election with no federal candidates on the ballot? The low salience 2025 election was a good test to see if our methods would work.
Key to the effort was creating a cross-campus coalition. I built a leadership team that included the offices of University Life and Community Engagement and Civil Learning (CECiL). Together, we worked with the local chapter of the non-partisan League of Women Voters. We recruited and trained more than 60 eager students who wanted to help their peers vote. Our program included:
- Formal training in the law and regulations around voter registration
- More than 20 campus tabling events between late August and early November
- More than two dozen presentations to classes and student organizations
- A website and email hotline for accurate voting information and resources
- An energetic Instagram campaign explaining why and how to vote
- Sidewalk chalk art and messages leading up to Election Day
- A mobile mural with Mason Murals to spark conversations
- Broadcast and editorial content produced with Student Media
Our group, organized as Mason Voting Ambassadors, was not the only organization working to stimulate student voting this year. Over the course of the fall semester, I saw candidate campaigns on campus (especially the Spanberger for Governor campaign), Next Gen (a Democratic aligned voter mobilization group), Feminist Majority, League of Conservation Voters, College Democrats, College Republicans, Black Fraternities and Sororities, and others. Altogether, the campus climate for civic engagement and voter education was livelier and more robust than in previous years.
But did any of it matter?
After the election, we analyzed turnout at the university’s precinct in Merten Hall—the polling place for on-campus residents. Voter turnout indeed increased from 2024 to 2025. But before claiming success, we needed to rule out a simpler explanation: Were statewide gubernatorial campaigns driving turnout everywhere?
The graph below compares the voter turnout in the 2024 presidential election to the 2025 gubernatorial election voter turnout across all 260 voting precincts in Fairfax County.
The results stunned us: George Mason was the only precinct in all of Fairfax County to see an increase in voter turnout compared to the 2024 presidential election.
Not only that—turnout at the polling place was 48% higher in 2025 than in 2024. In a year when turnout typically falls across the state, George Mason moved dramatically in the opposite direction.
It seems we did something right.
Our research has confirmed it: Students vote when we lower the barriers to voting. When campus, community, and political organizations came to campus this year to mobilize students, it had a real impact on voter turnout. Making voting understandable, accessible, and relevant drives young people to the polls.
This is the type of evidence-based social science students at the Schar School are learning—turning their passions into action and developing the social science tools to shape smarter, more responsive public policy for the world they’re inheriting.