EAST LANSING - Young adults are less likely to vote than their elders.

In Michigan, it's a lot less.

Michigan has the largest voter turnout gap of any state in the country between the overall population and 18-to-24-year-olds, more than 26 percentage points.

That's according to Jonathan Rodden, a Stanford political science professor who submitted a 60-page report in support of a lawsuit filed by Democratic students at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan against Secretary of State Ruth Johnson.

Among his conclusions: "Electoral participation and registration rates are extremely low in the vicinity of Michigan's colleges and universities."

The student organizations contend that young people, particularly college students, are disproportionately affected by Michigan's voting requirements, chiefly the requirement that the address where a person registers to vote match the address on their driver's license.

There are other hurdles, too, one of which brought Claire Duncan out to a blue trailer on MSU's campus last month, a mobile Secretary of State Office that's towed to campuses across the state.

The MSU sophomore had applied for an absentee ballot weeks before. What she didn't know when she sent in her form was that, as someone seeking to vote for the first time using an absentee ballot, she first had to appear in-person at a Secretary of State branch or local clerk’s office to verify her identity.

If the city clerk from back home in Gross Pointe Farms hadn't called to explain that to Duncan, she wouldn't have known, wouldn't have gotten an absentee ballot by mail and would have had to make the three-hour round trip back home to vote in person on Nov. 6.

Registering to vote on campus would eliminate those hurdles. It would also mean changing the address on her license with every move made while attending MSU.

“I’m not going to live in the same dorm the rest of my life,” she said. “I still have plans to go back home after college, and that’s my home address.”

It was a 1999 act sponsored by former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers that put the address requirement in place. At the time, Rogers was a state senator, but the following year he would run for Michigan's 8th Congressional District, which includes MSU's campus.

The lawsuit filed by college Democrats said the existing requirements place "nearly insurmountable barriers between many young voters and their fundamental right to vote," and they are asking the court to declare that 1999's Public Act 118 violates the 26th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits the restriction of voting by citizens over the age of 18.

“The law was litigated almost 20 years ago in federal court,” Secretary of State spokesperson Fred Woodhams wrote in an email. “For more than 20 years, residents have been able to conveniently update their address for both driver’s license and voting purposes.”

But the court isn't scheduled to consider the case before the Nov. 6 election.

And this may be an election that young people turn out for, both because of the national sense that the stakes are high and because of Michigan's proposals that would legalize recreational marijuana and introduce a new system for drawing electoral districts.

Whether and where students choose to vote could have a significant impact on local elections, particularly the race for the 8th Congressional District between incumbent Republican Mike Bishop and Democratic challenger Elissa Slotkin.

The district, as it happens, was ground zero for Michigan's restrictive voting requirements.

More: College Democrats: State laws discriminate, make it too hard to vote

How we got here

Rogers sponsored Senate Bill 306 in February of 1999.

Aside from requiring addresses from licenses and voter registration to match up, the bill also required the Secretary of State to automatically change a person’s voter registration address to match a requested new address.

An analysis by the House Fiscal Agency in 1999 included the following:

“Critics of the bill are concerned that the legislation will discourage voting and decrease participation, particularly among students in college towns. (Indeed, some people suspect this is the intent of the bill, to dilute student voting.) There is no problem with the current system so serious as to deny people the choice of using different addresses on driver licenses and voter registration records.”

A transcript from a March 18, 1999, Michigan Senate Session submitted to the court by the college Democrats includes an exchange between Rogers and then-state Sen. Dianne Byrum about the proposed changes. Byrum argued that college students want to keep a home address because of frequent moves and keeping track of financial aid and banking documents.

“The policy that she's advocating is basically we don't want them to do it right, we want them to be able to be registered in one place and live in another place,” Rogers said, according to the transcript. “That's just, I mean, kind of a slap in the face to democracy, and I don't think that's where we want to go.”

Messages left with Rogers' office seeking comment were not returned.

The following year, Democrat Byrum challenged Rogers in the 8th Congressional District race. He defeated her by just 111 votes.

“Mass chaos on campus is what I remember,” said Bryum, who went on to be elected to the MSU Board of Trustees.

She remembers the East Lansing clerk's office being overwhelmed the day of the election as they contended with inaccurate voter registration lists and a lack of staff. Phone lines went down due to the volume of calls, while people were being challenged on their registration at precincts.

“(The clerk’s office) was not prepared for the turnout and the new law and how that was going to impact students," Byrum said.

What's going on in Michigan?

In his report for the college Democrats, Rodden found that the gap between overall voter turnout and turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds was lower than the national average before Public Act 118. In its wake, the gap increased and, in 2016, it became the largest in the country.

“Since the implementation of Public Act 118, registration rates have grown more slowly in counties with large youth populations — especially those with universities — than in other counties," he further concluded. "In fact, in the decade since the law was introduced, registration rates have fallen over time or stagnated in several college counties while increasing in most of the rest of the state. The largest registration decline in the state was in Ingham County, home to Michigan State University.”

In November of 2016, 64.3% of Michigan citizens told the U.S. Census Bureau they voted. By contrast, just 37.8% of 18- to 24-year-olds reported voting.

Nearly one in three eligible voters under 25 who reported being registered to vote in the November 2016 election didn't do so, according to the Census Bureau, compared to 13% for all eligible voters.

It’s worth noting that the turnout gap data is based on what people told surveyors, said Corwin Smidt, an MSU professor who studies elections. He points out that the Secretary of State’s report for 2016 overall turnout among registered voters was 20 points lower than the census survey data.

Why would people over-report voting?

“Since Trump won (Michigan) by such a close margin, I'm guessing there's some people who are embarrassed to admit they didn't turn out and vote for Clinton," Smidt explained in an email.

Youth voter registration in Michigan isn’t the problem, Rodden concluded. That rate in Michigan is within three-tenths of a percent of the national average. Approximately 453,000 young people were registered to vote in the last presidential election out of some 813,0000 eligible to do so.

Turnout among young people is the real concern, Rodden wrote.

"Young people are disproportionately affected by the law requiring new registrants to vote in-person if their registration was by mail or through a third-party registration drive because they are likely to register through those means and they are much more likely to be first-time voters," he wrote. "Absentee voting is especially rare among young new registrants."

Sergei Kelley, a junior from Traverse City and vice chair of the MSU College Republicans, is among young people choosing to vote absentee in November.

“It’s just easier to do absentee voting,” Kelley said, adding that he doesn’t want to change his license address because Traverse City is where he considers home and where he wants to get his mail.

A lack of knowledge about the process of voting, and about what the Secretary of State actually does, could contribute to students not voting at the same rate as the overall population, Kelley said.

To remedy that, Kelley said, the process needs to be made clear and simple and to convey the impact voting can have.

Michigan doesn’t make it as easy to vote as neighboring states.

It’s one of 12 states that doesn’t allow electronic voter registration. Michigan also doesn't have early voting. And for absentee voting, voters are required to cite one of six allowed excuses for not going to the polls in person, such as being over age 60, being out of town on election day, or religious reasons.

When she turned 21 last November, Jenna Chapman headed to the Secretary of State's office near MSU's campus.

On her way, she got in line remotely and saw her estimated service time jump from 30 minutes to 5 minutes in mere moments. Scrambling, Chapman arrived, had her picture taken and completed the necessary forms.

When her new license came in the mail, Chapman noticed her address was changed from East Lansing back to her parent's home in Stockbridge.

She's not sure whether it was her mistake or the state's, but she wasn't able to make the trip back during a busy day of classes and didn't vote. She'd wanted to vote in East Lansing because a student, Aaron Stephens, was running for city council.

Asked how the state could make it easier for young people like herself to vote, Chapman, now an organizer with the progressive group NextGen Rising, said more information needs to go out about how easy it all can be.

"I think allowing people to register online would get a lot more young people to vote.”'

Getting out the youth vote

Looking out on around 100 people seated inside the MSU Union in late September, 8th Congressional challenger Slotkin asked the crowd how many of them had friends who were adamant that their vote didn’t matter.

More than a dozen hands shot up.

“People say my vote doesn’t matter a lot, and we respond by saying young people are now the largest voting bloc and by voting together, we can make a difference,” said Eliza Webb, the Michigan youth director for NextGen Rising.

Of the approximately 16,000 students who lived on campus in November 2016, around 5,500 turned out to vote at on-campus precincts. Roughly 8% to 10% of MSU students living on campus come from abroad and aren’t able to vote in U.S. elections.

There are indications, however, that this midterm election could see more young voters than the one that preceded it. In the 2014 August primary, just 104 registered voters turned out to campus precincts. This August, weeks before classes began, 495 voted.

NextGen Rising hosted former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed on campus in late September for a discussion of youth turnout.

“Generally, the fact of the matter is our political conversation hasn’t been very good at activating young people, and it's frankly politicians' fault, it’s not young people’s fault,” El-Sayed said.

Increasingly, El-Sayed said, he’s observed two extremes: those highly engaged in the process and those who feel completely left out. He believes young people are starting to see there’s a lot to win or lose in the political process, especially given that they’ll be alive much longer than the average voter.

Eli Pales, president of the MSU College Democrats, contends that young people don’t vote because they're far less partisan and won’t turn out for candidates who aren't speaking about issues that are important to them. He believes the recreational marijuana proposal will be a “huge motivator for young people to turn out.”

Devin Humphreys, a junior in MSU’s James Madison College and a Republican precinct delegate on campus, has other explanations. While there’s certainly a belief out there that one vote doesn’t matter, others are apathetic about the political process, he said. Another subset is simply confused about the process, chiefly, where to vote.

“I would argue that efforts need to be focused on people who would vote if only not for X,” he said. “Voters who could vote but aren’t.”

In his experience, lacking opportunities to register isn’t the problem. The question of whether he’s registered is posed to him practically every day.

“You have to work to not to register to vote on this campus,” he said.

Contact RJ Wolcott at (517) 377-1026 or rwolcott@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @wolcottr.

Voter registration

The deadline to register to vote in the upcoming November election is Oct. 9. For information on how to register, visit webapps.sos.state.mi.us/MVIC