The College Fix

ANALYSIS

Universities across the nation have found logistical ways to help Democratic candidates get ahead this election season, investigative reporting by The College Fix has found.

There are several ways university brass help stack the deck, but one primary method is by handing over massive reams of private student contact data to a third-party voter data company under the auspices of studying student voting trends.

More than 1,200 campuses participate in the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, launched during the Obama administration. Administrators essentially sign over students’ private FERPA data to take part in the study.

Although the third-party voter data company is supposed to cleanse the data of identifying information before it hands it over to be studied — then delete the data — there’s no proof it deletes it, and the company refuses to answer The College Fix’s questions regarding its data management.

Fun fact — the third-party vendor originally used for the study was Catalist, the Democrat’s exclusive voter data provider. Six years ago it was switched to L2, another massive data voter company with less obvious ties to Democrats.

“The left has created a very sophisticated system for obtaining valuable, non-public data about each student … without the knowledge or consent of the student,” one watchdog told The Fix.

Universities are usually pretty protective of students’ private information, and often love to hide behind FERPA laws when it suits them.

But somehow, the Harris-Walz ticket recently obtained tens of thousands of students’ emails and phone numbers and have used that data to lobby for votes in the swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin, and reportedly Georgia as well.

Campus spokespersons at public universities in both Arizona and Wisconsin have told The College Fix that, apparently, all one needs to do to obtain massive reams of student emails is to simply ask, it’s apparently public information.

Republicans paying attention might be wise to either try to text and email students en masse themselves during the next election cycle — or work to crackdown on this potentially unlawful leak of students’ data.

Whether the Harris-Walz campaign purchased the contacts from a voter data company or just asked the universities for it, calls for institutions to better protect students’ emails and phone numbers from being used for partisan purposes have grown this election season.

Even amid these breaches, another more obvious tactic instituted under the Biden administration has prompted alarm bells.

Biden’s U.S. Department of Education told administrators — under the threat of loss of federal funding — that they should hire college students to register their peers and work at polling places through the federal Work-Study Program.

It basically amounts to partisan vote harvesting for Democrats, as college students heavily lean Democratic. The College Fix recently reported on several such voter registration programs that have been overtly partisan in nature, with themes touting DEI, equity and anti-racism.

The scheme has drawn steep criticism from Congressional Republicans and a memo from 16 Republican Attorney generals to the Education Department, arguing the guidance breaks the law.

It’s been said elections today are won in the margins. It remains to be seen whether these efforts give the edge to the Harris-Walz campaign to eke out a victory Tuesday.

MORE: Read The College Fix’s election integrity articles here.

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