The college joins 20 schools across the state in an initiative to boost student voter participation in the upcoming election.
By Cara Nixon
August 24, 2026
Reed College is one of 20 schools across Oregon participating in Secretary of State Tobias Read’s Oregon Campus Voting Challenge, a program aimed at increasing student voter participation in the upcoming general election.
As part of the challenge, Reed has agreed to a series of actions to improve nonpartisan civic engagement on campus, including:
- Helping students build the habits of an engaged citizen.
- Making nonpartisan democratic participation a core value on campus.
- Convening a nonpartisan campus-wide working group that includes students and administrators.
- Engaging with data to improve campus resources and programming to support nonpartisan student civic engagement.
- Developing and implementing a nonpartisan action plan to improve civic learning, political engagement, and voter participation.
Professor of Political Science and Director of the Elections & Voting Information Center Paul Gronke provided his insight at a webinar launching the Oregon Campus Voting Challenge on Aug. 20. Voting amongst young people, he said, has been relatively flat for a fairly long time.
This is because young people are typically less politically engaged than older groups, largely due to the fact, Paul said, that they’re unhappy with the political system.
“They're dissatisfied with political leaders who are aging,” he explained. “...Folks like me vote at 80% rates, and guess what? The political system gives services to folks like me, and the services for younger people are not what younger people want right now.”
The good news, though, is that turnout has still improved over the last decade, and there are tools that can increase voter turnout among young people, like peer-to-peer learning and making the voting process fun.
“These are the future leaders of our democracy,” Paul said. “But we have to start now, start early, because voting is a habit, and we want to begin a habit.”
The Oregon Campus Voting Challenge works to help start that habit for young people.
The challenge is in collaboration with impact hub Civic Nation’s ALL IN Campus Democracy challenge—a nationwide initiative that empowers higher education institutions to achieve excellence in nonpartisan student democratic engagement. In past elections, campuses that are highly engaged in ALL IN programming have voter turnout rates that are 4–6 percentage points higher than their peers.
“Our elections decide our future, and no one has more at stake in that future than young Oregonians,” said Secretary Read in a press release. “...We are going to keep finding ways to get Oregonians involved in our elections because our state is stronger when more people make their voices heard.”