Over the past few years, the outpouring of political punditry about the MAGA movement’s supposed appeal among young voters has largely obscured Donald Trump and his allies’ brazen efforts to discourage many of those voters from reaching the polls.
Reading some of these articles, I’ve often asked myself, if MAGA world were truly confident in their appeal among this group, why would they be trying so desperately to stop so many of them from voting?
In fact, Republicans over the past decade have gerrymandered districts to deliberately dilute the voting power of students on college campuses and introduced new voter ID restrictions that make it harder for students to vote with school identification cards that previously sufficed in their states.
And if there were any doubt about the GOP’s war on young voters, Trump-linked lawyer Cleta Mitchell gave the game away back in 2023, when she gave a presentation to GOP donors in which she warned about the “young people effort” to vote, lamenting that polling places are too close to dormitories, which allows students to simply “roll out of bed, vote and go back to bed.”
That angst over college voters is necessary context for the Trump administration’s newly announced probe of Tufts University in Massachusetts over a program meant to study and promote voter participation among students.
Following Trump’s antidemocratic claim that Republicans should “take over” elections in numerous states, the Education Department announced a probe last Thursday of Tufts in a press release claiming — without evidence — that the university may have put students’ voter information at risk by participating in the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. Tufts describes the program as “a service to over 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities that can use it to understand and improve their student voting rates.” But the Education Department’s press release alleges the probe is needed due to what it’s calling “reports alleging that the process of compiling NSLVE data involves illegally sharing college students’ data with third parties to influence elections.”
“American colleges and universities should be focused on teaching, learning, and research — not influencing elections,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in the release. “The Biden Administration, with little to no regard for student privacy laws, openly encouraged institutions to share and utilize student data in order to target certain populations.”
McMahon claimed schools that participate in the program could be in violation of federal privacy laws, a threat underscored in a letter sent to college administrators last Thursday by the director of the Student Privacy Policy Office.
It’s worth noting here that Tufts’ website includes an explainer of how the NSLVE program uses publicly available data to conduct its research while also maintaining students’ confidentiality. Check out the “How does NSLVE work?” tab here.
So, to reiterate: The Education Department has provided no evidence to support claims of unlawful data sharing or election interference by the NSLVE. And such an allegation is rich coming from the Trump administration, given its recent raid of a Fulton County elections office in Georgia and other authoritarian efforts to acquire states’ sensitive voter information have been launched as part of a conspiratorial, political crusade and arguably pose the greatest threats imaginable to Americans’ data privacy.
And until McMahon or her underlings offer up actual proof to support their election interference claims with regard to the NSLVE, this probe appears to be little more than yet another gambit to prevent young voters from mobilizing and acting on their potential political power.
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