Economists explain that many people are "rationally politically ignorant". They feel the tiny impact of their 1 vote will have less of a benefit to their lives than whatever else they might spend their time learning (like college material...) or doing.

It takes far more time and effort for someone to become a well informed voter than it does for them to figure out how to register and vote. If they aren't spending the time to register&vote without being pushed into it, then it seems there is a good chance they aren't that interested in it since anyone capable of being able to get into college should be able to manage to register&vote if they truly wished to. It seems likely that even if you make it so easy for them to vote that they do so, that they won't expend the effort to be well informed before voting. Many might suggest our last presidential election, especially if you include the results of the primaries, is the result of uninformed voters.

Its not clear why some people are obsessed with merely getting "more voters" regardless of whether they are well informed? Do you feel your preferred political candidates are likely to appeal most to those who are poorly informed?

In the U.S., having only a small portion of eligible citizens vote corresponds with an increased likelihood that voters will pick candidates with extremist views. There are many exceptions to this rule, of course.

I still run into people who think it's a good idea to make it the law that people must vote, or face a penalty. I say that doesn't serve democracy, for the same reason you gave. It's just going to flood the system with uninformed voters, who just do it because they're pushed into it, but otherwise don't want to bother with informing themselves, because they didn't want to vote in the first place. Advocates point to Australia, where this requirement is in place, and they say, "It's worked out pretty well for them." Well, I'm sure there are people in Australia who disagree with that assessment.

Or... maybe since people know that they have an obligation to vote, they will make a point of being informed.

If you can show me some studies where people have strived to improve their performance in a task when they are forced into that task (and are not rewarded or penalized based on performance, just on performing the task), I might become convinced of your position.

One issue is that voter registration and address on drivers licenses should match. Even back in 1972 it was not that hard to send away for the request for an absent ballot then send it back get the ballot and vote. It is far easier today with the forms online. However college town activists seem to in general to want to bulk the student vote up in local matters.

Also keeping the home address likley preserves the homeowners policy protection against theft of goods away from home.

The Northwestern approach is the way to go. Undergrads should know the political situation where they grew up better than the college town also at least for a couple of years.

yes, there's also always the danger of the famous college-town bubble--everyone gets synced to the same political events and spends their years of electoral "formation" familiar and comfortable with that than what's needed for non-college-town political labor

Some of the latest field experiments actually find that social media can be effective in mobilizing voters. See, for example, Holly Teresi and Melissa R. Michelson, "Wired to Mobilize: The effect of social networking messages on voter turnout." Social Science Journal 52, 2 (June): 195-204. In any event, Northwestern's increase in registration and turnout rates is remarkable! Well done! More campuses should follow your lead.

Thank you for citing my study. For the record, the email study published in the Political Research Quarterly was not conducted at Temple University. It was a national field experiment (of almost 260,000 students) conducted on 26 college campuses. I work for Indiana University. My co-author currently works at Temple, though he was working at Notre Dame at the time we conducted the study.

We should educate people on the issues that voting centers around, but neither encourage nor discourage people to vote. Voting is not something citizens are required to do, but rather something they have the ability to do. If you try to push voting too much, you get more votes from people who know very little about the candidates and topics at hand. Look at the recent video aired on Jimmy Kimmel of people attempting to point out a country on a global map (their failure is heart-breaking for us who have made education a career).

And in general college students should be voting absentee ballots in their home parishes~counties and districts -- not in their college town.

Not necessarily. Many of them don't intend to return to those areas.

Please, today's college kids already have actual commitments: their future wages, which will be less in real dollars than their parents', will have to pay for this generation's bank bailouts, unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy, military conflicts around the world, and insufficient taxation to keep the Boomers' SS and Medicare on stable ground.

You may care about elections more now, but in terms of the number of years left in their lives, the young do have more at stake--especially when it comes to the Supreme Court, for example.

Quit dragging the good name of logic into this discussion as you are not following a logical argument. You are rationalizing your position. You hold a position to be true and you are constructing reasons to make your position seem tenable. This is not logic.

A lot of things motivate people and your examples are puerile. We could just as easily say the older a person is, the more they've settled into partisan political bias irrespective of facts and national interest.