Rollins Designated a Voter-Friendly Campus

Rollins has once again been designated a Voter-Friendly Campus for 2025–26, joining 272 institutions nationwide. The College is one of just 15 Florida colleges and universities to be recognized through the Voter-Friendly Campus program, a partnership developed in 2016 by Fair Elections Center’s Campus Vote Project and NASPA’s Lead Initiative.

The program empowers students during a pivotal election year by giving them the information and tools they need to participate in the political process. This marks Rollins’ fifth consecutive designation since the program’s first cohort in 2017, underscoring the College’s unwavering commitment to civic engagement and student voter participation.

“Due to ever-mounting barriers, engaging students in our democracy is not easy work,” says Robert Brandon, president and founder of Fair Elections Center. “However, these schools have taken remarkable steps toward institutionalizing voting practices into their operations to ensure young people on their campuses are able and ready to fulfill their civic responsibility.”

Campuses were evaluated on their ability to complete a multistep process, which included engaging a coalition of campus stakeholders in developing a nonpartisan plan to engage student voters in 2024, facilitating voter education and engagement efforts on campus, and writing a final analysis of their efforts reflecting on what worked and what to change going forward.

“During the 2024 presidential election, we focused on emphasizing the importance of civic engagement and civil dialogue, visiting RCC [Rollins College Conference] classes, hosting watch parties, expert panels, and information sessions, and registering around 100 voters out in the August and September heat,” says art history major Stella Morris ’26, former student coordinator of the Democracy Project. “I couldn’t be prouder of the work that my team and I accomplished over the school year. Knowing that through efforts like the Democracy Project Rollins lives out its mission to civically engage the student body is a personal source of pride.”

The Voter-Friendly Campus designation program was formed as a tool to support higher-education institutions in fulfilling the requirements of the Higher Education Act of 1965 and aims to help institutions develop democratic engagement action plans that coordinate administrators, faculty, and student organizations in civic and electoral engagement.