Voter Engagement at Radford University

Highlanders Vote: Voter Engagement at Radford University

In 2022, Radford University began its first campus-wide strategic efforts to support and enhance student voting engagement. Dr. Chapman Rackaway, Chair of the Political Science Department, leads those efforts through the Campus Voter Team in conjunction with the Citizen Leader program.

The Highlanders Vote program is a comprehensive resource for students seeking to register to vote, learn more about the process and duties of voting, discover candidates and issue positions, and find support in casting their ballot.

Building the Infrastructure

Campus voter engagement does not happen on its own. It requires year-round planning, institutional partnerships, student leadership development, and consistent attention to the structural barriers that prevent college students from participating. When I took on leadership of Radford's Campus Voter Team in 2021, the university had no coordinated voting engagement infrastructure. What existed was episodic — registration drives timed to election cycles, with limited connection to broader civic learning goals and no systematic way to measure impact.

Building Highlanders Vote meant creating something durable rather than reactive. That involved establishing a student advisory team, developing a calendar of engagement activities that runs across the full academic year rather than spiking in October, building relationships with the Pulaski County Board of Elections and the Virginia Department of Elections, and embedding voter engagement into the curricular and co-curricular programming of the Political Science department. The Highlanders Vote faculty advisor role, which I hold, is not a ceremonial title — it means active, ongoing engagement with student leaders, institutional partners, and national networks.

National Recognition

Radford University's commitment to student voter engagement has earned recognition from the two leading national organizations in this space. We are designated a Voter Friendly Campus by the Campus Vote Project, a distinction that reflects not just the existence of voter engagement programming but its quality, consistency, and institutional integration. That designation has been renewed across multiple election cycles — 2021-2022, 2023-2024, and 2025-2026 — a record that reflects sustained commitment rather than a single-cycle effort.

Radford is also recognized for having a Highly Developed Campus Voting Plan by Civic Nation's ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, and earned ALL IN's Most Engaged Campus designation in 2024. The ALL IN framework requires institutions to demonstrate not just programming but assessment, strategic planning, and continuous improvement — the same standards that govern academic program quality. Meeting that bar year after year is evidence that Highlanders Vote operates as a serious institutional program, not a student club with occasional voter registration tables.

Assessment and Evidence

Radford participates in the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE), administered by the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University. NSLVE provides participating institutions with data on student voter registration and turnout rates, disaggregated by academic major, age, and other demographic variables. That data drives our planning. Understanding which student populations are registering and voting at lower rates, and which campus interventions appear to move those numbers, is what separates a strategic voter engagement program from an aspirational one.

We also participate in the American Democracy Project through the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, which situates Radford's work within a national network of more than 300 public colleges and universities committed to preparing students for informed civic participation. I have served on the ADP National Steering Committee since 2024 and as an ADP Civic Fellow since 2019, roles that give me direct access to the most current research and practice in campus civic engagement and allow me to bring those insights directly back to Highlanders Vote.

A Long Record at Multiple Institutions

Highlanders Vote is the current expression of a commitment to campus voter engagement that spans my entire career. I built voter engagement programs at Fort Hays State University beginning in 2004, earning Voter Friendly Campus recognition there as well. I served as ADP Campus Coordinator at both FHSU and the University of West Georgia, where I directed all campus voting engagement activities from 2017 through 2021 — including voter registration drives, early voting shuttle programs, on-campus polling site management, and runoff election efforts during Georgia's high-profile 2020-2021 election cycle. At UWG, that work was conducted during one of the most consequential election periods in recent Georgia history, requiring real-time coordination with county election officials and rapid adaptation to changing public health conditions.

That cross-institutional record matters because it demonstrates that Highlanders Vote is not a program that happened to me at Radford — it is a program I know how to build, sustain, and improve anywhere. The infrastructure, the partnerships, the assessment practices, and the national network are all transferable, and I have transferred them before.

The Act of Leadership

Voter engagement work offers a revealing window into a university's inner workings. It requires coalition building across administrative units that do not naturally coordinate — student affairs, academic affairs, the registrar, facilities, and external government offices. It requires external relationship management with county and state election officials who operate on their own timelines and priorities. It requires student leadership development, because the most effective voter engagement is peer-driven. And it requires data literacy and assessment discipline, because national recognition programs demand evidence of impact, not just good intentions.

Every one of those capacities is directly applicable to the work of academic administration at the college level. Highlanders Vote is, among other things, a demonstration that I know how to build institutional infrastructure, sustain it across years, assess it honestly, and connect it to a national network of practice.