Baala Shakya, Contributing Photographer

In its inaugural year, Yale Votes’ Democracy Liaison program sought to help students vote in the past week’s election.

94 percent of Yale’s undergraduate population are from out-of-state. For those eligible to vote, absentee ballots and lengthy trips back home to the polls were some of the many factors that made voting in their home states challenging this year.

The Democracy Liaison program, started through the Office of the Secretary and Vice President for University Life’s Yale Votes Initiative, offered guidance in the run-up to the election. From sending out mail-in ballot information to offering stamps in college offices, the program aimed to make voting more accessible. 

In its pilot year, it included 57 trained liaisons across all 14 residential colleges.

“I don’t think the Democracy Liaison program was adequately advertised across the residential colleges. Some colleges heavily promoted the program while other colleges didn’t,” Julia Lin ’26, vice president of Yale Votes, wrote to the News. Still, she believes the program had successes this year.

Lin expressed that more effort to improve outreach in the head of college offices in future elections would enable more students to utilize the program. 

Silliman College, for example, “did a phenomenal job advertising the program via posters in entryways, digital signage and email reminders,” Lin believes. She added that their daily reminders about absentee ballot mailing information and free packaging were crucial for the program’s success.

Alex Moore ’26, president of Yale Votes, said that the organization intends to collect qualitative data on the program’s success in the coming months and create a strategy to develop it further.

“As we survey students on their experience of the election and receive hard data on the number of students the liaisons served, we’ll be able to identify more ways to improve the program going forward,” he wrote.

John Robert Walker ’28, who voted for the first time in this past election, said he utilized the program’s resources at Stiles College.

He explained that most of his exposure to the Democracy Liaisons was through the weekly emails sent out by the head of Ezra Stiles College. Though he was able to use the program, he said that he found that other students felt under-resourced throughout the process.

“Talking with my peers, I had to help guide them towards those resources. I think they could do a better job of promoting the program equitably across all of the residential colleges so all students feel supported,” he said.

Before the election, many students also failed to receive their mail-in ballots and could not vote in their home states. Many Texan students in particular failed to receive their ballots on time.

The News has previously reported that mail-in ballots may have been lost because students addressed them to the package center on campus, which is unable to process paper mail.

“The biggest challenge for the democracy liaisons and students in residential colleges was around receiving voting mail on which the legal name, required for the request to vote by mail, did not match the preferred name a student uses at Yale,” Nina Fattore, associate director of University Life, wrote.

She explained that the discrepancies made it challenging for college offices to determine whom the ballots belonged to and often meant that they were eventually sent to Fattore. She was often able to match the legal name on the ballot to the student’s preferred name and send them back to the appropriate residential college.

Yale Votes was founded in 2021.