For Sadie Rosenthal, a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, choosing to vote in the US swing state rather than her native Maryland was a no-brainer.
“I know my vote is so incredibly important here as an out-of-state student, so I wasn’t even hesitant when it came to switching my registration,” the 22-year-old Kamala Harris supporter told AFP from the lakeside terrace of the campus’s historic Beaux-Arts student center.
In a presidential election where Democrat Harris and Republican Donald Trump are polling in a virtual dead heat, Wisconsin is among seven battleground states crucial to winning the White House.
Roughly half the 50,000 students at UW-Madison are from outside the state, but according to state voting residency requirements, any citizen is eligible to cast ballots in Wisconsin once they’ve lived at their intended voting address for 28 consecutive days.
That means out-of-state students have a choice: vote at their “permanent” address — for many, their parents’ home, where they grew up — or their Wisconsin address.
Maryland will almost certainly go for Harris no matter what, but in Wisconsin, voters “arguably have some of the largest impact in the entire country,” said Rosenthal.
“It’s our duty to help win this state,” she said, citing issues like abortion rights and climate change.
She’s not alone: New Yorker Reese McLean, 19, also registered under her campus address.
“I knew that my vote would make more of a difference here,” she told AFP after emerging from an early-voting site where she queued for two hours to vote for Harris.
– High voter turnout –
Over the past quarter-century, four of six presidential elections in Wisconsin have been decided by less than one percentage point, with the winner taking the state’s 10 votes in the Electoral College that determines the national outcome.
UW-Madison professor Mike Wagner said that means “the student vote could be determinative, especially if out-of-state students register to vote in Wisconsin.”
That could also be the case in Pennsylvania and Michigan, also swing states home to large public university systems.
But UW-Madison consistently boasts among the highest student voter turnout in the nation, even in non-presidential election cycles.
When President Joe Biden eked out a win against Trump in 2020, 72.8 percent of eligible UW students voted, numbers that mirrored trends across the state.
Key to Wisconsin’s high turnout is that eligible voters can register in-person at the polls, including on Election Day.
More than half of US states require registration in advance, meaning someone who decides the vote at the last second often can’t.
Alexia Sabor, chair of the local Dane County Democrats, told AFP reaching the out-of-state population is “absolutely” a strategy: “If you choose to vote in Wisconsin instead, your vote for the Democrat can potentially change the direction of the state, potentially change the direction of the nation.”
– ‘My vote matters more’ –
The concept isn’t lost on state Republicans.
Conservative Wisconsin lawmakers recently proposed a bill that would require schools within the UW system — one of the nation’s largest, which includes 13 campuses statewide and enrolls more than 160,000 students annually — to distribute to all first-year students information on voting in their home states.
Critics branded it an effort to siphon off likely Democrats in a state that in the 2022 midterms led the nation in youth voter turnout, with nearly half of eligible voters aged 18-24 casting a ballot.
The bill failed, but it’s one of many Republican initiatives to tighten voting laws on university campuses, including controversial voter photo ID laws shown to disproportionately impact minority and young voters.
Wisconsin’s former Republican governor Scott Walker signed such voter ID legislation in 2011, and years of legal wrangling have followed.
“Young voters are the issue,” Walked said on social media following a hotly contested state Supreme Court election last year, which saw a Democratic win shift the court’s balance.
“It comes from years of radical indoctrination,” added the conservative, who now leads an organization focused on popularizing right-wing politics among youth.
“We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again.”
Although Wisconsin campuses generally lean left, out-of-state students can give Republicans votes, too.
Bryan Zumba, 22, was born in New York and grew up in Chicago before moving to Wisconsin for college.
Outside a polling station, the senior told AFP he cast his ballot there for the exact reason his Democratic peers voiced — only he opted for Trump.
Here, he said, “my vote matters more.”
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