Kansas’ college students, rural voters have different needs. Don’t lump them together

Last week, the Kansas Legislature overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a state congressional map designed to diminish the political power of the state’s student population, as well as its Black and Hispanic voters. Kansas voters deserve better.

Perhaps the map’s most egregious new district places the state’s two largest universities, the University of Kansas and Kansas State University, into the rural 1st Congressional District, artificially combining the schools’ two distinct communities with a larger surrounding population whose needs and representative interests differ vastly from student voters’. The new district’s makeup would likely diminish or outright eliminate young voters’ ability to elect representatives who prioritize the needs of university communities over the interests and priorities of a mostly rural population, who are likewise poorly served by being grouped with tens of thousands of college students.

As natives of rural western Kansas and Manhattan, and alums of KU and K-State — now lumped together in the Big 1st — my co-author and I know and love both types of communities in our home district. The unique needs, qualities and values that distinguish them from one another merit their own districts and representation. And the redistricting process uncovered no evidence that the communities themselves disagree.

There is no record of public requests for KU and K-State to be placed in the same district. In fact, the city of Lawrence, home of KU, opposed the proposal. In total, the public was given less than 24 hours to submit testimony for state House and Senate hearings on the proposed map, and the deadline passed before a full dataset on the map was ever made available to the public.

A fairer, more transparent process would have enabled more input from voting blocs — students and young voters, who make up such a large share of the state’s electorate that Kansas’ 2022 gubernatorial election ranks third in Tufts University’s Youth Electoral Significance Index, a data-driven ranking of the top races where young voters have the highest potential to influence upcoming election results. Instead, this significant portion of the population would be shut out from influencing who represents them at the district level, and forced to navigate a new map that unnecessarily splits 17 different voting districts, which would likely cause administrative confusion at upcoming elections.

That the redistricting process would target college students is all the more disheartening given it’s taking place on the heels of a 2020 election cycle that featured record-breaking turnout from student voters. According to the 2020 National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement report released by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education, college students voted at a historic 66% rate in 2020, matching the overall electorate and marking a 14 percentage point increase over 2016. The same report shows voting rates at KU (71.0%) and K-State (67.3%) actually outpaced the state of Kansas as a whole (65.9%). And these numbers can’t be passed off as a 2020-specific aberration: In 2018, students voted at more than double the rate they turned out in 2014.

High student voter turnout is something to be celebrated, not opposed and diluted. Engaging young people in the democratic process is one of the most important ways we can ensure that civic values and participation endure with future generations of voters, while also establishing behaviors now that will help convert new voters into lifelong participants in our democracy. By targeting Kansas’ two largest student voter populations with a proposed map that would diminish their voting power, the Kansas Legislature has done exactly the opposite.

This story was originally published February 16, 2022 at 5:00 AM.