The Boston College mailroom buzzed with an anxious energy as Elizabeth Healy, MCAS ’25, checked her mailbox during the days leading up to the presidential election.
Many students amid the whir were expressing worries and concerns about the status of their absentee ballots, she said. Healy was concerned about her ballot as well.
“It’s not like I missed the registration deadline or didn’t get my application for my mail-in ballot on time—it just didn’t come,” Healy said.
Well before election day, college students across the United States and in Massachusetts felt the weight of national concerns about mail-in voting. Many navigated stricter voting requirements and complications with out-of-state registration.
Healy, a New Jersey resident, registered to vote in the midterm election and filled out her absentee application in September. Despite her early planning, Healy said her ballot never arrived on campus.
“I guess I was kind of surprised because I figured that I was the only one, so I felt really bad,” Healy said. “Then I heard about other people too.”
Healy said she expected the process to be easier, especially because she was doing everything in her control. Looking back, though, she said she feels disappointed that she could not complete her civic duty.
“People always talk about Gen Z not voting, and I know a decent amount of people that truly had the desire and the follow through [to vote], and then it didn’t end up happening,” Healy said.
Luke Mangano, a resident of Ohio and MCAS ’28, also never received his ballot in the mailroom.
Mangano said he requested his absentee ballot in September but did not receive any updates about it for four weeks. Once he managed to get his local election office on the phone, they informed him that he had to re-apply for his ballot. For a second time, it never arrived.
“To this day, I still haven’t received anything,” Mangano said. “It’s just terribly confusing to me because I know that ballot requests and ballots get priority shipping.”
Like Healy, Mangano said he checked the mailroom many times in hopes that his ballot would come.
“I went to the mailroom once or twice a day for a while because I was thinking, ‘Maybe if I get it on election day I could still send it back,’” Mangano said.
Mangano is frustrated not just because the results of the election are not what he had hoped, but also because the fiasco robbed him of his first experience voting in a U.S. election.
“I didn’t even get the opportunity, and it wasn’t my fault,” Mangano said. “There’s nothing more I could have done.”
Mariam Abdelhalim, CSON ’25, said she tried to avoid complications with her absentee ballot applications by having it sent to her mom in Colorado rather than to Chestnut Hill. She planned to have her mom send it to her so that she could fill it out.
But, Abdelhalim was unable to vote because the ballot never arrived to her mom. She tried to order another one, but it was too late to be counted.
“My biggest issue about it was that I had no control over my vote at all,” Abdelhalim said. “I just wasn’t able to. It honestly meant a lot to me.”
Allee O’Neil, MCAS ’25, and Emma Randall, MCAS ’28, both received their ballots, but are unsure if they were counted.
O’Neil lives 45 minutes away from BC and knew before election day that she would not be able to go home to vote. Her family applied for absentee ballots, which they all sent together before election day. None of them were tracked on Massachusetts’ election website.
“I’m hoping it was counted correctly and that I can find some updates on that in the future,” O’Neil said.
Randall, a New Jersey resident, said she eventually received her ballot just one day before the election but is still unsure if it was counted, despite her haste.
“I really quickly filled it out and sent it, but I don’t actually know if it got counted or not, or if it made it in time,” Randall said.
Both O’Neil and Randall said they live in states that voted in line with their political beliefs, but they still wanted their voices to be heard.
“Maryland is very blue, and I’m also a Democrat, so it wouldn’t really matter if I voted or not,” Randall said. “But I really did want to.”
Abdelhalim said she thinks college students’ difficulty voting by mail is a bigger issue than most would think.
“I know the political climate is really tense surrounding topics of voting, so it’s something that has to be approached carefully because of past voting issues,” Abdelhalim said. “I just think that in the future they should have a system with less difficulty doing it.”
Randall said she feels like the University could have done more to help students—especially those who are out-of-state—with the voting process. When she was researching where to mail her absentee ballot, the only resource she found was a post on the BC Democrats’ Instagram page.
“Maybe I’m not following the right accounts, but I feel like voting wasn’t as prevalent on campus as I thought it would be,” Randall said.
Randall said she still feels a sense of pride and gratitude that she had the chance to vote, but thinks the mail-in voting system needs an overhaul to make it easier for college students to civically participate—especially for their first time.
“I feel like everyone says, ‘Go vote, it’s really important,’ yet the resources and ways in which this mail-in voting system works is not really efficient at all,” Randall said.
Nicole Murphy contributed to reporting for this article.
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