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WASHINGTON--As the country gears up for another national election cycle, university students looking to cast their first ballot in a presidential race may run into some unexpected obstacles at the polling place, if they even get there.

Progressive organizations are mobilizing to raise awareness of a batch of new voting laws that many states have enacted or are considering that would set new identification requirements for either registering to vote or pulling the lever, provisions the groups say would have the effect of suppressing the youth vote.

Organizations such as Campus Progress, an affiliate of the Center for American Progress, which is hosting its national conference here this week, are protesting new laws soon taking effect in states, such as Wisconsin, Texas and South Carolina, that will require some form of official photo ID to cast a ballot, measures they say will effectively disenfranchise many low-income Americans, minorities, the elderly and college students, particularly those attending private or out-of-state schools. In Wisconsin, for instance, the law slated to go into effect ahead of the 2012 election will require voters to bring a state-issued photo ID to the polls, carrying certain restrictions that could render students with only the ID they were issued by a state university ineligible to cast a ballot. Critics of voter ID laws similarly warn that older voters who no longer have a driver's license could be turned away, and cite studies highlighting the disproportionate number of low-income and minority Americans who don't have a state-issued ID. Across the general population, it is estimated that as many as 11 percent of eligible voters don't have a government-issued ID.

"We consider voter ID a modern-day poll tax," said Eric Marshall, the manager of legal mobilization with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group that is helping coordinate opposition campaigns to the new voting requirement laws. The organization maintains a map tracking the movement of voter laws in each state, indicating that more than half have either passed or are considering photo ID legislation.

Politics in play

The laws, many of which have passed or are pending in Republican-controlled statehouses, are billed as a needed measure to combat voter fraud. And they come at a time when many citizens and advocacy groups are concerned about an assault--real or perceived--on free and fair elections. The questionable voter registration practices of the controversial community organizing group ACORN in the run-up to the 2008 election added to those worries, as have other recent revelations of deceased people turning up on the voter rolls in Ohio and an official government study in Colorado that found that nearly 5,000 non-citizens voted in that state's 2010 election.

As a result, some lawmakers on the federal level have called for states to reevaluate and tighten their voting laws, helping build momentum for voter ID proposals.

And at the nonprofit level, organizations such as the Tea Party-aligned True the Vote (an offshoot of the King Street Patriots) are working to mobilize volunteers to monitor polling places in the upcoming election, building on an effort begun in Houston in the off-year election of 2009.

"We were shocked by what we discovered," the group says on its website. "We watched as election officials often failed to check voters' identification, disregarded polling documentation requirements and routinely accompanied voters to the voting booth and told them who they should or should not vote for, going so far as to fully prepare the ballot, make all selections, and instruct the voter to 'press here to vote.' Free and fair elections are an American birthright."

True the Vote highlights documented instances of voter fraud, which it says are seldom fully prosecuted, and advocates for tougher voter ID laws, restrictions on absentee ballots and limits on the window to register to vote.

But critics take a cynical view of the motivation behind the laws, noting the partisan tint of the backers of tough voter ID bills. They concede that voter fraud exists, but argue that the only form of it that the photo ID laws would target--impersonating another voter at the polls--is a problem whose scope is so negligible that the documented cases are isolated and no more than a very small rounding error.

"There's this assault all in the name of election integrity, all in the name of this rampant voter fraud that needs to be cracked down on that's a scourge of our society," Marshall told an audience comprised largely of students at the Center for American Progress offices. "It's a false narrative and all it's doing is allowing their space to pass these pieces of legislation that are for pure political partisan gain, and are often focused at you, young voters."

Students in the cross-hairs

As Exhibit A, progressive groups point to the unprecedented turnout of students and other young voters in the 2008 presidential election, a political awakening of sorts credited with helping assure the victory of Barack Obama.

Some of the loudest voices in opposition to voter ID laws draw a dark parallel to the various Jim Crow laws enacted to keep African-Americans and other minorities away from the polls after the Constitution had been amended to provide for universal male suffrage. And the bills' supporters, they charge, are pushing for the targeted exclusion of segments of the electorate they see as political opponents, namely students, minorities and the poor.

"Under the radar, there are a set of people trying to make it harder for students to vote," said Heather Smith, president of the youth voting advocacy organization Rock the Vote.

As a heterogeneous class that varies widely from state to state, voting requirement laws can pose a unique set of challenges for students. Some photo ID proposals would render a university-issued ID invalid, even if it was issued by a state school. Depending on how the final regulations are written in a given state, a student ID could be turned away from the polling place if the ID did not include certain personal information, such as an address.

Progressive groups are also advocating for reforms to voter registration rules to make it easier for students to register on Election Day or shortly in advance. Some states set a deadline for registration 30 days before Election Day, placing the cutoff at the beginning of the fall semester, a time when most college students aren't thinking about registering to vote. Advocates of voting reform are also looking to expand the options for early and absentee voting, measures they say would not only clear barriers for student involvement, but drive up overall turnout rates.

The law of the land

Legal challenges to voter ID laws face extremely long odds after a 2008 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of an Indiana statute requiring voters to present an official ID at their polling place, provided that the state offered residents the opportunity to obtain an ID at no cost, skirting the poll tax prohibition of the 24th Amendment.

In the meantime, progressive groups are pressing their case through organizing and awareness campaigns as they look ahead to the primary season and the 2012 general election. They have some allies at the federal level. Last week, Sen. Michael Bennett (D-Colo.) and 15 of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, including Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), delivered a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking his department to initiate a review of the new wave of voter ID laws that have been passed or are pending in the states. The Department of Justice has some limited oversight authority over states' voting laws under the Voting Rights Act.

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