Illinois State University is being recognized nationally as a Voter Friendly Campus. This is the second time Illinois State has received the designation.
The designation is awarded by the Voter Friendly Campus initiative, led by national nonpartisan organizations the Fair Elections Center’s Campus Vote Project (CVP) and NASPA (Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education).
Illinois State University is one of 258 institutions in the country earning the designation, which comes after intensive work over the last year and a half by the University’s Voter Engagement Coalition. To earn the designation, campuses were evaluated on their ability to complete a multi-step process, which included engaging a coalition of campus members from staff, faculty, students, community organizations, and local election officials to develop a written plan for how the institution would engage student voters in 2022, facilitating voter education and engagement efforts on campus, and writing a final analysis of their efforts reflecting on what worked and what to change going forward. The designation is valid through December 2024.
The mission of the 2023 Voter Friendly Campus designation is to bolster colleges and universities’ efforts to help students overcome barriers to participating in the political process – every year, not just during years featuring federal elections. The University’s Voter Engagement Coalition was formed in 2019 to help support the University’s core value of civic engagement through a particular focus on political engagement. The coalition’s duties have been to design and implement plans to increase student participation in the political process.
The institutions designated Voter Friendly Campuses represent a wide range of two-year, four-year, public, private, rural, and urban campuses, collectively serving over 3.5 million students. Notably, the list of designated institutions includes 49 Minority Serving Institutions and 13 Historically Black Colleges and Universities, as well as 41 Community Colleges.
