Trump admin escalates its war on young voters

President Donald Trump's administration is now aiming to make the voting process harder for college-age young adults ahead of November's midterm elections.

That's according to a Monday op-ed by MS NOW's Ja'han Jones, who wrote that the Trump administration's Department of Education may be exploring a way to curb young voter turnout with a newly announced investigation into Tufts University. The Education Department announced its new probe in a recent press release, saying the Boston, Massachusetts-based school may have been "illegally sharing college students’ data with third parties to influence elections."

The investigation is centered on Tufts' National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE). Tufts describes the NSLVE as "a service to over 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities that can use it to understand and improve their student voting rates." However, the Trump administration is saying the program could have potentially violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

"American colleges and universities should be focused on teaching, learning, and research — not influencing elections," Education Secretary Linda McMahon stated. "The Biden Administration, with little to no regard for student privacy laws, openly encouraged institutions to share and utilize student data in order to target certain populations."

Jones pointed out that the Trump administration's claims are false on their face, as Tufts' program uses publicly available data to conduct its research while maintaining students' confidentiality according to its website. Jones instead asserted that this probe was "little more than yet another gambit to prevent young voters from mobilizing and acting on their potential political power" ahead of what is shaping up to be a Democratic wave election in November.

As the MS NOW columnist wrote, Trump ally Cleta Mitchell — who represented Trump's 2020 campaign and frequently made baseless allegations of election fraud in swing states Trump lost — gave a presentation to Republican donors in 2023 warning about the "young people effort" to vote. Mitchell warned that polling places were too close to college dormitories, allowing students to "roll out of bed, vote and go back to bed."

The investigation comes not long after the Trump administration conducted a raid of an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and a cryptic announcement from an FBI official inviting state election officials to a conference call to discuss the 2026 election.

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