Brown University initiative helps students register to vote in upcoming elections

With the U.S. election coming up in November, Brown wants to give eligible students every opportunity to vote. Brown Votes, a university initiative, is helping to simplify the process.

The goal of the initiative is to reduce barriers to voting, members of the organization said. The initiative brought Brown the TurboVote platform, which facilitates voter registration nationwide. Anjelica Smith, senior director at Democracy Works, is helping to implement TurboVote on college campuses across the United States.

Smith said that while “since 2020, 16 million young people have joined the electorate,” voter registration rates are much lower among young people.

TurboVote also integrated with MyAccount and the BrownU app “to simplify the process,” said Logan Tullai ’25, Brown Votes advocacy chair and national president of Every Vote Counts.

Brown Votes is housed in the Swearer Center. Mary Jo Callan, the center’s director, emphasized the importance of community engagement not only nationally but also in state and local elections.

“Voting is one of the most important avenues for social change,” Callan said. “We often overlook the power of state governments. The decisions that local governments make are the decisions that affect our daily lives.”

Brown Votes has made a lot of progress since it was founded as a student group. For example, Election Day at Brown is now a holiday, which was difficult to coordinate and implement, said Austin Wilson, the center’s director of community-engaged learning. “There’s a huge amount of passion and direction from students” for the initiative, he added.

Brown Votes participated in new-student orientation this year and is currently hosting nonpartisan, issue-oriented information sessions. “If your issue is the Second Amendment,” Callan said, the presentations inform students that “political offices have a say in this.”

Tullai emphasized that students can choose where they want to cast their vote — here in Rhode Island or wherever else they live.

“If a student develops the habit of voting in college, it will continue throughout their life,” Wilson said.