Throughout the day Nov. 4 and 5, confused voters in several states reported having trouble casting absentee ballots. Some never received They either got the ballots they wanted or they got them too late. (Some states require mail-in ballots to arrive by polls close on Election Day to be counted.) Others sent in ballots but found they were not accurate. rejected or it didn’t come at all.

Voting intentions and issues: Absentee voting challenges may have a particularly strong impact on college students. Approximately one-third of students responding ONE Inside Higher Education/Generation Lab flash survey He said they plan to vote absentee or by mail when the vote is held in late September. This share was even larger (45 percent) among students who attended college in a voting district different from their permanent address.

Theresa J. Lee, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, is currently He represents voters in Cobb County, GA.Due to an error by the county, absentee ballots were never delivered. But he said there’s no reason to believe anecdotes from other parts of the country are linked to Cobb County’s problems or part of a systemic problem.

“Overall, there have always been election administration failures that were not malicious,” he said.

The story of a family: On Monday, Nov. 4, Genevieve Carpenter, a freshman attending the University of Arkansas from the suburbs of Kansas City, Mo., still had not received her mail-in ballot for Tuesday’s general election. Then his father, Shannon, took action.

“He filled out the paperwork (to request a mail-in ballot), had it notarized, and sent it off. “His friends around him got theirs, but his never came,” he said. Inside Higher Education.

Shannon got in her car, drove three and a half hours to Fayetteville to pick up Genevieve, brought her to the polls in Missouri to vote in person, and then brought her back to campus; And all on Election Day. He had originally wanted to head to Fayetteville on Monday, but hurricanes in the area disrupted his plan.

It was midnight when he brought his daughter back to her dormitory; He was reportedly in the car for about 12 hours. He decided to stay in a hotel before heading home the next morning.

She said she was willing to drive hours to help her daughter vote because she felt strongly that people should exercise their right to vote; This was something he tried to instill in his children by taking them to the polls in every election since their birth.

He acknowledged that the journey was not only time-consuming and tiring, but also costly; He spent the money on gas, the hotel he stayed in on Tuesday night, and meals.

“There’s a real financial cost to this, and I understand that a lot of people, a lot of college students, can’t afford to do this. “This is concerning for something that should be free and easy to do,” he said.

But he was also grateful to spend time with his daughter and son, who accompanied him on the trip.

What other students did: Elsewhere in the country, students reported making long drives, and in some cases flights, to their home states to vote.

Various news outlets reported that German graduate student Lexi Harder, who hails from the battleground state of Montgomery County in Pennsylvania, flew 15 hours to vote after her ballot was unexpectedly returned to her.

“Absolutely priceless. “I would pay three times that to go back.” Harder 6 told ABC.

Some students opted to vote in person at their college destination, using provisional voting or same-day registration to make last-minute replacements when it became clear their ballots would not arrive.

Mya Tolbert, a Towson University student and first-time voter, said: Inside Higher Education On Election Day, when her absentee ballot did not arrive in the mail, she decided to vote in person at the university’s campus polling place. Luckily, there was space between classes, so he was able to stand in line for over an hour.

What did you do to support students struggling with the election results? Tell us about it.