Intern Alonzia Quinn investigates challenges to voter eligibility at the NCSL

Every summer, the Bill Lane Center offers undergraduate internship opportunities placing students at organizations throughout the American West. Through these internships, students can explore careers in natural history, conservation, ecology, land use, museum curation, resource management, water, energy, literature, policy, politics, and more. Since 2005, the Center has supported more than 250 such interns in positions across the region, developing strong relationships with host agencies and cultivating future leaders of the West. 

This summer, the Lane Center placed Alonzia Quinn at the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), a nonprofit organization based in Denver that seeks to enhance the effectiveness and integrity of legislative bodies across the United States. During her internship, Quinn made significant contributions to the NCSL's research goals, working with the Elections and Redistricting team to create a comprehensive web page focused on the challenges voters sometimes face at the polls. In an article she recently published with her supervisor, Helen Brewer, Quinn details these challenges, and the rules governing voter eligibility from state to state.

As a primary project of her internship, the creation of the web page required Quinn to analyze how fair elections are conducted, specifically with regard to who may file a challenge to voter eligibility and the valid grounds for doing so. With the goal of ensuring voters are informed about their rights, her research addressed issues of identity, residence, disenfranchisement, and citizenship status. The resulting page provides an impressive outline of state-by-state procedures for challenging voters, including acceptable types of challenges and decision-making processes. 

Quinn's contributions to the NCSL demonstrate the win-win-win nature of the Lane Center internship program. As students learn from mentors at their jobs, and internship hosts gain dedicated student workers to serve their missions, the Western communities served by these organizations also reap the benefit of the partnership. After all, Quinn's vital research is now a publicly available document informing voters of their rights and giving them a say in the direction U.S. democracy could take in the years to come.