ASU Won’t Say If It Helped Give Student Data To Harris Campaign

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign reportedly sent 70,000 Arizona State University (ASU) students unsolicited texts over the weekend asking them to register to vote and vote for her. While the students’ contact information is technically “a matter of public record,” ASU would not confirm to The Federalist whether it willingly gave Harris’ campaign the data.

A text purportedly sent by the Harris campaign, received by an ASU student and posted to X by the ASU College Republicans reads, in part:

“Hi Sun Devils, it’s Kamala Harris. I wanted to remind you that the deadline to register to vote in Arizona is Monday, October 7. Thanks to record turnout among college students in 2020, I am Vice President of the United States Today.”

“Tim Walz and I are the underdogs in this election, but student voters could make the difference. We need your support to win. As an Arizona State University student, you can register and vote in Arizona,” the text reads. “Your vote is your voice and your power. You must not let anybody take your power from you.”

ASU first told The Federalist that “the contact information of enrolled students (including their cell phone numbers) is a matter of public record.”

ASU pointed The Federalist to the university’s website which states that under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), students’ contact information is considered “directory information.”

“It is common for entities that want to advertise to ASU students to request this publicly available contact information — everything from apartment complexes, to credit cards, to political candidates,” ASU said in a statement to The Federalist. “Any student who does not want their directory information to be released may file a form requesting their information be withheld,” the statement continued.

Notably, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, recently introduced the Student Voter Data Protection Act, which would “safeguard the personal data of college students from being exploited for partisan voter registration efforts.” The legislation would amend FERPA “to explicitly prohibit students’ private information from being shared without their consent for voter registration drives.”

The Federalist further inquired with ASU whether the “Harris campaign directly reach[ed] out to ASU requesting the data” or whether the campaign obtained it “without any ASU involvement.”

“You have our statement,” the university said in response.

Students at the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University also received texts from Harris’ campaign, according to the New York Post. Northern Arizona University President for Communications Kimberly Ott told the New York Post that “We receive these types of requests many times throughout the year and the requestor must pay for the data they ask for.”

The University of Arizona explicitly told The Post it “did not receive a request from the Harris campaign for directory information.”

But even if the mass unsolicited texting scheme doesn’t work for Harris, she has the weight of the taxpayers behind her. President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14019 shortly after taking office that authorizes federal agencies to expand voter registration and get out the vote efforts “using White House ‘approved’ third-party organizations to help get the GOTV job done,” my colleague Matt Kittle explained. In fact, both high school and college students are paid through the Federal Work-Study program to register voters and work as “poll watchers.”

Legal fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability Sofia De Vito told The Federalist that such guidance is meant to “provide legal top cover to education bureaucrats, enabling them to hire an army of college students using taxpayer dollars.”

“If this is allowed to continue, we’ll see campuses across the country deploy these foot soldiers into Democrat strongholds to get-out-the-vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024,” De Vito continued.

But the effort to turn out college aged voters is top-down, with Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes announcing in May that his office would partner with ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge to create the “Arizona Campus Voting Challenge.”

The program is meant to increase voter engagement of students attending accredited universities in the state. During the 2020 election, more than 6 in 10 voters aged 18-29 voted for Biden, according to Tufts University. And during the 2022 midterms, voters between the ages of 18-29 broke for Democratic House candidates over Republicans by a near 2-to-1 margin, according to estimates by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

While billed as a “nonpartisan initiative,” ALL IN is part of Civic Nation, which is headed by Valerie Jarrett who previously served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, as pointed out by my colleague Shawn Fleetwood.

“The initiative has previously produced Democrat talking points, such as the baseless claim that ‘strict voter ID requirements’ are ‘barriers’ to voting,” Fleetwood explained.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2