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A candy poll helped draw students at Swarthmore College into a conversation about voting and civic engagement on National Voter Registration Day. As students cast their votes for their favorite candy, they could also pick up voter registration forms and learn more about the November midterm elections.
Sydney Hankin, a student leader at SwatVotes who organized the event, said the initiative was about making voting less intimidating.
“The idea is to show that voting is something you do in your everyday life in non-political ways. You rank your favorite candies, you have preferences about so many things in your life and I think that’s the connection there,” she said.
Nearly 50 million people ages 18–29 are eligible to vote in the 2026 midterm elections and 56% are “extremely likely” to vote, according to research from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. Though Pennsylvania has consistently had a higher youth voter turnout than the national average, turnout in midterm elections remains significantly lower than presidential elections.
In order to combat low youth voter turnout, the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, founded in 2016, works with universities nationwide to increase civic education and engagement. In Pennsylvania, the organization partners with the Secretary of State. As part of the initiative, each university adopts a campus-wide voting coalition and partners with local election officials or non-partisan organizations in the community to develop action plans for their campus.
Action plans detail each university’s civic habits and provide a comprehensive strategy that student representatives and faculty will use to institutionalize civic engagement on campus. Every two years, the action plans are given to the team at ALL IN, who provide feedback based on a rubric.
ALL IN’s executive director Jen Domagal-Goldman wants university representatives to “really think about who their students are” when creating the action plan. “There’s no one right way of doing this. You have to think about who your students are and how to reach them,” she said.
“If you think about the institutions in and around Philadelphia that we work with, those include campuses like the Community College of Philadelphia and UPenn and Drexel and Temple, right? And they serve very different students, so thinking about how you reach those students.”
