When Texas native Mariel Camargo ’25 received her absentee ballot in the mail, it was already one day too late for her to mail it back. Her ballot’s postmark was two weeks old.
As a non-Californian, Carmago is part of the 58.8% of Stanford’s undergraduate domestic student population that come from outside the state. While locals headed to the polls on Nov. 5 to cast their votes in person, many such students, ran into difficulties with ordering, receiving and mailing their absentee ballots for the 2024 election.
Consequently, many students were unable to cast their vote in the election.
While waiting for her ballot, Camargo called the elections office, and they told her they had mailed her ballot two weeks before Election Day. She said she spoke to staff at the Tresidder Package Center several times to check if it had arrived, but they said it had not.
The package center handled absentee ballots in the same way as all other mail, associate director of communications Sonia Singh wrote in an email to The Daily. The center processes mail and notifies students immediately as soon as the mail is received.
Singh wrote that the University has “no control” over how the United States Postal Service (USPS) processes mail — including absentee ballots.
Emma Neidig ’25, who is also from Texas, flew back home on Election Day to cast her vote in person because of the issues she had experienced trying to mail in her ballot. Neidig said the cost of her flight home was “worth it” as a political science major and “someone who this election was super important to, as a female.”
Neidig sent an absentee ballot request over email, but said the Early Voting Clerk also requested the physical copy within four days after the application deadline. She paid around $35 to ship it in time with USPS, only to have her application rejected because something was filled out incorrectly, Texas election officials told her. Since the deadline for the request had passed, the elections office told her that her only option was to vote in person.
While Neidig was grateful to have the privilege to fly home to vote, she said it felt “ridiculous” to do so for two minutes of voting.
Gideon Witchel ’28 experienced similar issues. He requested his absentee ballot from Texas via mail as soon as he arrived on campus in September.
When he hadn’t received his ballot around a week before the election, Witchel called his county’s elections office. Staff at the office informed Witchel that they had never received his application. By then, it was too late to request another ballot.
Witchel said it was “disheartening” to have his chance to contribute to democracy “shut down by the bureaucracy.”
Gabrielle Rosado ’28, who is from Henderson, Nev., felt especially motivated to vote in her swing state this election. However, she waited over a month to receive her absentee ballot and struggled to fill out her absentee notice online. She received the ballot only a week before the election. Fortunately, her county elections office in Nevada received it two days after she mailed it back.
“We were just joking, but [my friends and I] were like, ‘Yeah, they don’t want us absentee voters to be absentee voting,’” Rosado said.
Some students found requesting an absentee ballot to be a tedious process. Maya Walker ’28 said requesting her ballot from Pennsylvania involved printing and filling out a paper, mailing it to her elections office, waiting for the ballot and sending the ballot back in the mail. Some of Walker’s friends from states with similarly arduous processes did not vote because of how long the processes took.
“That’s scary, and I think it’s a form of voter [suppression],” Walker said.
Witchel and Carmargo said they were worried about large-scale voter disenfranchisement. Witchel said he thinks conservative states are being strategic in making it more difficult for out-of-state residents to vote, as he says people “who are traveling more, seeing more of the world” are more likely to vote liberally.
Given the scale of the issue, Camargo said she believed the Republican Party or Texas purposefully made it more difficult for absentee voters.
“It’s funny that a lot of people, specifically students, that typically lean more to the left, were kind of f—–d up,” she said. “Their chances of voting were messed up because of the state and I definitely think it was something strategic.”
However, Camargo said she did not think the college students who were unable to vote would have had a significant influence on the outcome of the election.
“My vote in my red county and red state, I don’t think necessarily caused much sway,” Neidig said. “However, internally, I think it was worth it and I’d do it again even if I knew what the outcomes of the election were,” she added.
Rose Griffin ’25, who is from Texas, said she has struggled with voting throughout her time at Stanford. She thinks Stanford could do more to help students order their absentee ballots and designate a time to mail out ballots early.
Griffin said the struggles with mail-in ballots disproportionately affects the youth population, which can have drastic consequences. Griffin said youth may no longer feel their vote matters due to frustration with the system — when in fact their generation has “a lot of ideas and opinions and [looks] towards the future.”
Griffin was encouraged when, casting her vote for the first time this year, the elections officials got the whole room to clap for her.
“It feels not that important in the moment,” Griffin said. “But at the end of the day, we have created a whole democracy on top of this idea of having people being able to voice their beliefs.”
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