How Trump is trying to suppress voting on college campuses before November

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has been brazen in trying to make it harder for certain people (Democratic-leaning voters) to vote in November.

He has demanded from the Republicans “take control” vote and nationalize the elections, and your White House says so “I cannot guarantee” It will not place immigration agents at polling stations, which would be illegal and would aim to discourage immigrants from voting. he is now refusing to sign No more bills will be passed this year until Congress passes the SAVE America Act, a sweeping Republican measure that would all but ban voting by mail, require photo IDs to vote and require people to present a passport or birth certificate to register to vote.

But there’s another, less visible way his administration is apparently trying to stifle voting in the upcoming election, and it’s targeting a specific faction of people who tend to vote Democratic: students on college campuses.

The Trump administration is pursuing the National Learning, Voting and Engagement Study, a 13-year-old nonpartisan research group that tracks student voting rates on more than 1,000 college campuses. NSLVE, which is based at Tufts University, works with schools to boost student participation in national elections. He is credited with helping increase college student participation in 39% in 2016 to 47% in 2024.

The goal appears to be to discourage universities from participating in programs that encourage their students to vote. While Trump has drawn unusually strong support from young voters in 2024, those voters have turned sharply against him and favor Democrats by wide margins in public polls.

Dakota Hall, executive director of the Alliance for Youth Action, a group focused on engaging young people in democracy, said there is “no legal basis” to hinder the program.

“This is voter suppression, plain and simple,” Hall said. “We will not allow fear of retaliation to silence a generation of young people.”

What’s more, the administration appears to be going after NSLVE based on a dark conspiracy theory pushed by a prominent far-right think tank.

Brynn Anderson via News

Last month, the Department of Education announced an investigation at Tufts and the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit clearinghouse that compares student enrollment records to publicly available voting records. He accused NSLVE of illegally sharing students’ personal data with organizations to “influence elections.” The department also sent threatening letters to college and university leaders across the country, warning them not to work with NSLVE or risk being caught violating federal privacy laws.

Except there is no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of NSLVE. Even the Department of Education’s letter to universities admits that its investigation is based on a “preliminary analysis.”

And NSLVE doesn’t even have the personal details of the students.

Receive aggregated and anonymized data from the National Student Clearinghouse. Basically, NSLVE tells college campuses how many of their students voted in a given election, without anyone’s individual data or details about voting options.

So what’s going on here?

A Department of Education spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

A Tufts University spokesperson said a statement from March 10 on its website defending NSLVE’s work and its compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, a 1974 federal law that protects the privacy of students’ education records.

“NSLVE is a non-partisan longitudinal study that seeks to understand Yeah students vote, no WHO they vote,” the Tufts’ statement reads.

“All data received by Tufts from the Clearinghouse is anonymous, and NSLVE reports include only aggregated, de-identified data on overall student voting trends,” the university says. “Tufts does not request, receive or review any information that identifies students and never has access to information about party affiliation or candidate selection.”

He adds: “NSLVE, by design, is FERPA compliant.”

Trish Lorino, spokesperson for the National Student Clearinghouse, would only say that the organization is committed to following the laws.

“We remain firmly dedicated to FERPA compliance and will continue to prioritize our support of the Clearinghouse’s core mission and the institutions we serve,” Lorino said.

“NSLVE… seeks to understand whether students vote, not who they vote for.”

– Tufts University

The administration’s accusations against NSLVE appear to come from a dark report from 2023 by a group called Verity Vote, led by election conspiracy theorist Heather Honey.

Honey, a far-right activist and election researcher, is known for misrepresent Pennsylvania voter data in 2020 and falsely claiming that more votes were reported than voters, something Trump parroted to his supporters on January 6, 2021, before they stormed the US Capitol to try to prevent Joe Biden from being certified as president. Trump has since designated honey to an election integrity position at the Department of Homeland Security.

A couple of conservatives news Departures wrote about the Verity Vote report in 2023 and 2024: Honey was even cited by one of them, but the accusations in the report were never substantiated, so nothing came of it.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a staunch Trump ally who was previously on the president’s short list for a Supreme Court nomination, presented a bill in 2024 based on the same accusations. It didn’t go anywhere either.

Now the Trump administration appears to be trying to resurrect these allegations and make this an issue that impacts the 2026 election.

National youth voter groups say the administration’s actions are a clear case of attempting to intimidate colleges and suppress the youth vote in upcoming elections.

“The attack on NSLVE is baseless and baseless,” said Arianna Jones, executive director of NextGen America, a leading organization that empowers young people to organize and vote. “The Trump administration’s investigation into an organization whose sole purpose is to better understand youth civic participation and engagement is deeply troubling, but not surprising.”

But even if the Department of Education’s investigation is nonsense, it is already having the desired effect. The National Student Information Center announced that it is cutting ties with NSLVEeffective March 27, citing its commitment to following federal privacy laws.

Without the clearinghouse providing data to the NSLVE, and with university presidents threatened with possible financial consequences if they work with the NSLVE, it is not difficult to see how this could hinder efforts to boost student participation in the 2026 elections.

One group has notably been celebrating the National Student Clearinghouse cutting its ties with NSLVE: the America First Policy Institute, a far-right think tank run by a who’s who from former and current senior Trump administration officials, including Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. The group even appears to take credit for inspiring the research.

In a statement last week, the group greeted the dissolution of NSLVE’s partnership with the clearinghouse and stated that college students are “finally being protected.”

Separating the two groups “represents an important step in ensuring that sensitive student data is not exploited for political purposes,” said Anna Pingel, campaign director at the America First Policy Institute. “The purpose of higher education is to prepare students for the world of work, not to turn them into involuntary targets of political operations.”

At the end of its statement, the America First Policy Institute says it sent a letter to the Department of Education earlier this year “raising concerns that the association may have allowed sensitive student data to be shared with third parties for political purposes, potentially violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.”

Guess who announced the department’s investigation at that time: McMahon, the former chairman of the board America’s First Policy Institute.

The institute did not respond to a request for comment on the role it played in instigating the Department of Education investigation. Instead, a spokesperson said they had raised concerns with NSLVE based on the group’s own description of how it carries out its work.

“NewsI raised these concerns based on NSLVE’s own description of its process for ensuring that federally funded institutions do not allow the disclosure of sensitive student information in a way that can be exploited for partisan purposes: Student data privacy and support for election integrity are non-partisan and non-political,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “It’s just good policy.”

via News

Hall, of the Alliance for Youth Action, said it seems obvious that the administration is going after NSLVE because Trump knows of its support among young voters. is plummeting.

A Wall Street Journal survey from late January found 58% of voters under 30 years old They now disapprove of Trump’s performance. An Economist-YouGov poll conducted in February found that support for Trump among Generation Z (the cohort of people born between 1997 and 2012) has increased. fell to its lowest point in his second term, with 67% of voters between 18 and 29 years old disapproving of his presidency.

Youths were certainly key to the coalition of voters that helped secure the Trump victory in 2024. Today, many of those voters say they are having buyer’s remorse.

“He’s using the federal government as a weapon to make sure he pays for it before November,” Hall said of Trump. “Instead of changing his deeply unpopular policies, he is manipulating the system.”

It is unclear how long the Department of Education’s investigation will continue. Meanwhile, some groups of young voters say it’s more important than ever for them to step up to encourage democratic student participation in the upcoming elections.

“NSLVE has benefited campuses across the country in their efforts to help students participate in the voting process,” he said Jen Domagal-Goldman, executive director of ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization focused on boosting voter participation on campuses. “But activities like voter registration are not dependent on the NSLVE and can continue.”

“We remain committed to our mission of increasing student voter participation and helping students form habits of active and informed citizenship,” he said.