Portland State’s ‘Puppies at the Polls’ part of voter registration effort aimed at college students

To get students registered to vote, Portland State University brought out the big dogs.

That is, they brought in Missy, a 12-year-old Labrador retriever who loves squeaky toys and belly rubs. And 7-year-old Brea, another black Lab, who prefers the beach, peanut butter treats and cheese.

The therapy dogs sat patiently as students gathered to pet them on a recent Tuesday during a bustling lunch hour in PSU’s student union.

“People are motivated by free food and dogs,” said Jack Damm, a Portland State University senior and chief justice of the student government’s Judicial Review Board.

“I know I’m motivated by free food and dogs,” he laughed.

Damm said events like these bring people together by providing incentives. Once they’re around things they enjoy, organizers can ask them questions like, “Hey, are you registered to vote?”

PSU held its “Puppies at the Polls” event with the League of Women Voters about a week after PSU’s fall term started, and a week before voter registration closes for Oregonians.

It’s one of many similar events on the downtown Portland campus this fall. And PSU is among two dozen campuses — and counting — across Oregon taking part in a new statewide competition.

Oregon’s Secretary of State’s Office is partnering this year with the national organization ALL IN to launch the Oregon Campus Voting Challenge, a nonpartisan effort meant to get students signed up to vote and actually cast their ballots.

Participating colleges range from Tillamook Bay Community College on the coast to Eastern Oregon University, to Chemeketa Community College and Linfield University in between.

“Older people vote, and younger people just historically don’t,” Damm said.

Damm is studying political science and hopes to one day be a public defender, then a judge. As someone in the political world, he’s especially passionate about this.

“I vote by mail because I’m from Texas, so … I have to really fight it to get my ballot in,” he said. “But, like, in Oregon, they mail your ballot to you.

“It’s just such an important process that a lot of people take for granted.”

Damm wants his peers to understand that “electoralism isn’t everything, but that’s one of the most effective parts of our system that we have for making change and making sure our voices are heard.”

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Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read described the challenge as a win for everyone. Like Damm, Read sees it as hands-on civic education.

“Students get to use their voices,” Read said in a social media post about the challenge. “Schools provide a valuable learning opportunity, and all of Oregon benefits because when more eligible people vote, our government will be more in line with what Oregonians really want and need.”

The national campus democracy challenge is a little different this year.

Typically, ALL IN collects data in partnership with the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement program at Tufts University in Massachusetts to see which campuses signed up the most students to vote and how many formally submitted ballots.

But the U.S. Department of Education’s ongoing investigation into Tufts and the National Student Clearinghouse, alleging the data collection violates the Family and Education Rights Privacy Act (FERPA), has halted the data collection that ALL IN typically relies on.

Tufts officials said NSLVE is a longitudinal, nonpartisan study that seeks to understand whether students vote, not who they vote for. They’ve stressed that all responses are voluntary and that the data is anonymized.

They’re still moving ahead with the registration challenge this year, but ALL IN is judging schools mainly on their action plans for community engagement events, rather than hard numbers.

Jen Domagal-Goldman, executive director of ALL IN, said they have over a decade of data from midterm and presidential election years, showing patterns in college student voting that are helping inform their plans this year.

“Over 60% of the campuses in Oregon that are participating have already submitted their 2026 action plans for the midterms, which we’re excited about,” she said earlier this month. “And then, we ask them to kind of track voter registration and turnout, and work to increase it.”

Domagal-Goldman has been involved with the group in one way or another since it started in 2016. She said they’ve found that “college students weren’t voting at the rates that we kind of had assumed.”

Many political observers see the possibility of major shifts happening in the 2026 election cycle, from control of Congress to a tight race for Oregon governor. But even if the stakes are high, organizations like ALL IN have learned that college students, first-time and younger voters can face barriers to voting.

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Domagal-Goldman can relate. She said she grew up in a family that was really involved in voting, right down to proudly wearing their “I voted” stickers.

But she also remembers being in college. She said if her mom hadn’t reminded her about her absentee ballot and made sure she followed every step in the right order, she might have missed her first presidential election.

“Not because I didn’t want to,” Domagal-Goldman said, “but because I was busy trying to get along with my roommate, and I was busy trying to pass calculus.”

That’s why campuses participating in Oregon’s democracy challenge are coming up with creative ways to get students’ attention.

Enter dogs.

“Events like this can be a lot clearer entryway in for students that are like, ‘I’m interested, I want to engage. I want to learn, but I also want to do something fun,’” said Madeline Frisk, the coordinator of student government relations and adviser to Greek life at PSU.

Frisk said colleges serve as central hubs of information and places to learn new things — even if it’s just where the closest ballot box is or how ranked choice voting actually works.

It’s a place “to figure out what is that next step,” she said, “what are they passionate about, and how do the issues that they’re passionate about translate to what’s on the ballot and what candidates are saying and what they’re actually doing.”

Student leader Damm says it’s especially important that they connect with people who’ve historically been underrepresented in political office. ALL IN works with hundreds of Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

“The more people that get involved that aren’t the same white men over and over again,” Damm said, “the more it will be able to have representation of communities that need their voices heard.”

And the challenge seems to be working.

ALL IN works with more than 1,000 campuses across the country. According to the organization’s data, those campuses have voter turnout rates that are 5 percentage points higher than their peers.

Oregon’s voter registration deadline is Tuesday, Oct. 13, ahead of the Nov. 3 election. See if your campus is participating in this year’s Oregon challenge here.