Milan Parker (she&her)

Where Is Home When It’s Time to Vote?

The first time I really understood that voting wasn’t as simple as people made it sound was when I missed the 2020 election.

I was in college in Georgia, completing my sophomore year while living on campus. I was one of the few students able to return and have some sense of normalcy when everything else in the world seemed uncertain. On a short walk downtown to Decatur, I mailed my absentee ballot in the same box I used to send letters home and mail Depop packages.

But my ballot never made it to California. By the time I realized, it was too late.

What made it worse was not just missing the election, but missing what everyone around me kept calling “the election of our lifetime.” And I was not even sure where I was supposed to be voting in the first place.

Between 2019 and 2020, I moved between my grandmother’s home in Florida, my mom’s home in California, and college in Georgia. My state ID was tied to one place, my mailing address to another, and the community where I spent most of my time was somewhere else entirely.

I did not have one place I could point to and say: this is where I live, and this is where I belong.

So when my peers at Agnes Scott College – most of them Georgia residents – made plans to vote together, the process sounded simple: register, go to a nearby polling place, often a local church, and vote. Most knew where home was. I was still figuring it out.

It Wasn’t Just Me

Mary Williams learned about Agnes Scott during high school and was drawn to its global program. She toured the school and fell in love with it.

As an in-state student, voting was more accessible to her than it was for many of her out-of-state classmates. She had learned about Georgia civics in middle school, knew more about how elections in the state worked, and saw voter-registration drives during move-in weekend.

Mary first voted in the 2020 presidential election while studying political science at Agnes Scott. Her classes discussed U.S. election cycles, the 2016 election, and elections in other countries.

“I remember feeling called to not only vote myself, but to also ensure that everybody in my immediate family voted as well,” she said.

But she watched some out-of-state friends struggle. They did not always know how mail-in or absentee voting worked, and some felt less engaged because they could not easily drive or fly home just to vote.

“I do believe that being in-state makes it easier for students to vote because they’re already familiar with how the voting environment works within their state,” she said.

For Diana Alvarado, who moved from Miami to Rice University in Houston on a full-ride scholarship, the question was not whether she could vote. It was where she was eligible to register and cast a ballot.

Diana knew registering was important and that elections mattered beyond presidential races. Student voting representatives at Rice gave her information about registering in Texas and general advice about voting as a college student.

After speaking with a more civically active friend, Diana decided to stay registered in Florida, where she had grown up and felt more familiar with the issues and candidates.

“Our conversation is what led me to decide on Florida,” she said, “given the fact that I had grown up there and was more privy to the social context which candidates were trying to influence.”

What the System Doesn’t Account For

Moving away for college already means learning a new city, meeting new people, and figuring out who you are. For Diana, it also meant learning the value of registering in her home state and understanding the steps necessary to vote while living somewhere else.

She wishes someone had explained that more clearly before she went away to college.

“I think that people misunderstand youth not being registered to vote as apathy,” she said. “A lot of the time, it’s a lack of understanding of the value of civic engagement.”

Mary sees a different obstacle. Even students who are registered and know where to vote can struggle to find time around work and school. They can also struggle to research local candidates, especially when ballots are long and information is difficult to find.

In a recent Georgia primary, Mary spent almost a week researching candidates across more than 30 races, from local offices to congressional and Senate seats.

“Younger generations have a lot of cynicism about the state of the world,” Mary said. “A lot more people who don’t vote believe that the outcome is already decided before they do anything.”

Making voting easier for young people does not mean lowering expectations. It means recognizing that sometimes people need someone to show them where the door is before they can walk through it.

For students whose lives do not neatly fit in one state or one address, the problem is not always whether they care enough to vote. Sometimes, it is figuring out where home is when it is time to do it.