Report: College Students Don’t Vote Absentee Because They Don’t Know Where to Buy Stamps

A new report suggests that college students don’t vote with absentee ballots because they don’t know how to buy stamps.

A report from WTOP-FM, a radio station in the Washington D.C. area, suggests that young people aren’t voting with absentee ballots because they don’t know where to purchase stamps. The finding comes from a focus group in Virginia who sought to figure out why so few college students were voting in elections.

“One thing that came up, which I had heard from my own kids but I thought they were just nerdy, was that the students will go through the process of applying for a mail-in absentee ballot, they will fill out the ballot, and then, they don’t know where to get stamps,” Lisa Connors with the Fairfax County Office of Public Affairs said in a comment to WTOP.

“They all agreed that they knew lots of people who did not send in their ballots because it was too much of a hassle or they didn’t know where to get a stamp,” she added. “Across the board, they were all nodding and had a very spirited conversation about ‘Oh yeah, I know so many people who didn’t send theirs in because they didn’t have a stamp.’”

While young Americans may be more skilled than their parents with e-mails and text messaging, they might need some extra education when it comes to traditional mailing.

Local officials in Virginia claim that they are working to make it easier for college students to participate in elections. “We’re really working on information to get the college students to be able to actually vote where they’re registered and vote absentee because it’s very confusing and it has a lot of pieces that can sort of go wrong in the middle of it,” one local official said in a comment.