To vote in the 2024 election, Lia Symer remembers checking in at her polling place with her student ID card. "I tend to not carry my driver's license on my person when I'm walking around campus. Most students just carry their student IDs to get into buildings," says Symer, who's about to start her senior year at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire — one of about three dozen states with in-person voter ID laws.
But to cast a ballot this year, Symer is going to need to show a state ID, U.S. passport or another accepted identification now that New Hampshire has become the latest of several states to ban registered voters from using a student ID to verify their identity at the polls. Weeks before New Hampshire's student ID ban began in June, a federal appeals court put a similar Indiana law back into effect in April. And earlier that same month, Florida's Republican Gov.
Ron DeSantis signed into a law an upcoming ban on accepting student IDs when checking in voters at the polls. Florida's restriction is set to start in 2027. Those state laws come amid President Trump's so-far failed push for a Republican plan to overhaul voting in federal elections in every state, including a proposal that would not allow in-person voters to use student IDs.
New Hampshire's legislature passed its student ID ban as part of a slate of bills "adding security and transparency" to the state's elections, as the House Republican caucus put it. But this month, the Coalition for Open Democracy, a voter advocacy group, filed a lawsuit, arguing the New Hampshire law is unconstitutional for burdening eligible students' right to vote and discriminating against younger voters for their age. While the legal fights over the bans in New Hampshire and Indiana continue, voting rights advocates are adding another item to their agenda ahead of this fall's midterm election — helping students navigate these latest hurdles to the ballot box for the U.S. voting-age group that's least likely to vote.
While some states ban any student ID for voting, others allow certain kinds to be used depending on what school issues them, for example, or whether they show a photo or address. In North Carolina, for instance, colleges and universities must get approval from the state's board of elections before their student IDs can be accepted as voter ID. And in Georgia, only student IDs from public institutions are allowed, leaving out seven of the state's 10 historically Black colleges and universities, including Morehouse and Spelman Colleges.
The intricacies of state voter ID laws, student voting advocates point out, can trip up many of the country's least experienced voters. "Student IDs have been a source of attempts at controlling who votes on the part of legislators who want to manipulate the process, and that's not necessarily new," says Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director at Fair Elections Center, a voting rights group. "I think there's been, this year, an additional wave of that happening.
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