This week, I had the esteemed privilege of helping run the Student Government and Inter-Residence Council initiative to provide NC State students with a free ride to the North Carolina primaries. I worked at Talley Student Union all day long, helping make sure students were set to vote, placing them on buses and watching the packed buses drive away. 

There, at the main bus stop, I was fortunate enough to meet hundreds of students who heard the call to go vote. As the day wore on, I was even more impressed when students still got on the buses in throngs, even though the lines stretched for blocks at Pullen Community Center, the polling location the buses were running to. Outside of Talley Student Union, I kept getting reports that lines at the polling place were taking at least two hours to wait in. As I stood back, realizing I probably wouldn’t be up for waiting two hours to cast a ballot, I was humbled as students shrugged when they heard about the length of the lines and still got on the buses to go vote. 

“I just have to vote, there’s no other way around it,” one student replied. And another, when hearing about the lines, responded “So what? That isn’t going to stop me.”

So, to the hundreds of students who cast a ballot in this election whether by absentee, early voting or Election Day voting, and even more so to the students who stood for hours in the lines to vote, thank you. You inspire me. 

However, amidst a wholeheartedly encouraging day, a problem arose to me time and time again, something I feel must be addressed in the conversation of voting laws in North Carolina. Throughout the day, I was forced to turn away hundreds of students from being able to ride the free bus to the polls simply because they weren’t registered to vote at Pullen Community Center.

Hundreds of these students were still registered to vote at their hometown miles away in North Carolina, and still hundreds more had used an on-campus address when registering that just happened to correspond to a different polling site because of the way the Wake County precinct lines are drawn, crisscrossing our campus. In all, a conservative estimate of 300 students were turned away, prevented from voting simply because they weren’t registered at the correct address in North Carolina. 

Some may argue “too bad,” that it’s the college students’ faults for not changing their voting addresses the moment they got on campus or not voting early. But are we really that stringent of a state that we stop hundreds of registered voters from exercising their rights to vote? Instead of turning students away from the polls, we should be welcoming them with open arms, creating a long-standing habit of voting in our states’ students, not a habit preventing them from doing so.

The average college student believes that if they are registered to vote in North Carolina, they should be allowed to vote in North Carolina on Election Day and not have to go to a single, specific polling location. However, our state’s rules force college students to have the foresight to check their voting address months in advance of Election Day. A college student’s priorities are grades, friends, sleep, food and, of course, “Is it really still a Monday?” It’s not until about thought number 783 that we get to: “I wonder if my North Carolina voter registration is updated to allow me to vote on the nearest polling place to campus come election time?” While yes, students are capable of doing this, forcing students to do this just to exercise their rights to vote is ridiculous. 

Numerous other states provide a simple solution to this problem: They allow same-day voter registration for people to be able to change their addresses. If this had been in effect on Tuesday, hundreds of NC State would have been allowed to vote, not, as it was, turned away in utter frustration. 

When I informed students that they couldn’t vote at the Pullen Community Center last Tuesday, many were disappointed, devastated that they couldn’t vote in the election, many of whom were prevented from voting for the first time in their lives. However, many others refused to take my word that they probably wouldn’t be allowed to vote and still went down to the polling place knowing it was their only chance to be able to vote. There, dozens of students stood in hour-long lines without even knowing if they would be able to cast a ballot. 

In North Carolina, polls close at 7:30 p.m., but if you’re in line by that time, you are still allowed to vote no matter how long it takes. On Tuesday night, our last bus picked students up from the polling place at 11 p.m., three and a half hours after the polls had officially closed. On this bus was a group of students who had gone to the community center even though it wasn’t their assigned polling location. There, these students had stood for hours, arguing with poll workers and fighting for their rights to vote. In the end, many of them had been able to fill out a provisionary ballot. One student, whose assigned polling location was just 20 minutes away from NC State but had no way of getting there, told me he stood in line for more than five hours just to be able to cast a ballot. 

So, if you tell me NC State students don’t feel strongly about voting to necessitate a change in our state law to allow students to change their voter registration address on Election Day, I’m sorry, but I’m calling B.S.