As of Monday, Genevieve Carpenter, a freshman from suburban Kansas City, Mo., who attends the University of Arkansas, still had not received her mail-in ballot for Tuesday’s general election. So his father, Shannon, took action.

“She filled out the paperwork (to request an absentee ballot), she had it notarized, she sent it in.” The friends around her got theirs, but hers never came,” he said while speaking with Inside higher education on the phone Tuesday afternoon. “So rather than worry about it, we waited until yesterday, and I was like, ‘Who cares.’ I’ll just come and get you.’

Shannon got in his car, drove three and a half hours to Fayetteville to pick up Genevieve, took her back to the polls in Missouri to vote in person, and then drove her back to campus, all on Election Day . He had originally wanted to leave for Fayetteville on Monday, but tornadoes in the area interrupted his plan.

By the time he took his daughter back to her dorm, it was midnight; he had been in the car for about 12 hours total. He decided to stay in a hotel before returning home the next morning.

Genevieve Carpenter is not the only registered voter who requested but did not receive an absentee ballot for this election; Throughout the day Monday and Tuesday, confused voters in various states reported problems with voting by mail. A few never received the ballots they requested, or received them too late. (Some states require mail-in ballots to arrive before polls close in order to be counted.) Others submitted their ballots but found they were rejected or never happened.

Theresa J. Lee, senior counsel for the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, is currently representing the voters of Cobb County, Georgia.whose absentee ballots were never delivered due to a county error. But she said there’s no reason to believe anecdotes from elsewhere in the country are linked to Cobb County’s problems or are part of a systemic problem.

“In general, there have always been failures in election administration, which are not ill-intentioned,” she said.

Issues surrounding mail-in voting can have a particularly strong impact on students. About a third of the students who responded to A Inside higher education/ Generation Lab flash survey conducted in late September indicated they planned to vote by mail or absentee ballot. This share is even higher – 45% – among students who attend university in a different electoral district than their permanent address.

Shannon Carpenter said he was willing to drive hours to help his daughter vote because he believes people should exercise their right to vote – something he worked to instill in his children taking them to the polls in every election since they were born.

He recognized that the journey was not only long and tiring, but also costly; he spent money on gas and the hotel he stayed at Tuesday night, as well as meals.

“There is a real financial cost to this and I understand that a lot of people, a lot of students, cannot pay to have this done. This is worrying for something that should be free and easy to do,” he said.

But he was also grateful to spend time with his daughter and son, who accompanied him on the road trip. The siblings, who hadn’t seen each other in a while, spent the long car ride catching up and debating stupid what-ifs, like what their last meal on Earth would be.

“It’s a joy to listen to,” he said. “They’re a family, and that’s what I did, and I’m proud of what I did.”

Elsewhere in the country, students reported long drives — and, in some cases, flights — to their home states to vote. Multiple media outlets reported that Lexi Harder, a graduate student in Germany from Montgomery County in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, flew 15 hours to vote after her ballot was returned to her from unexpected way.

“It’s definitely priceless. I would have paid triple to come back. Harder Said 6 ABC.

Others chose to vote in person where they attended college once it became clear their ballots would not arrive, using provisional balloting or same-day registration to make the change. last minute. Mya Tolbert, a student and first-time voter at Towson University, said Inside higher education On Election Day, she decided to vote in person at the university’s campus polling place when her absentee ballot was not received in the mail. Fortunately, she had an interval between classes, which allowed her to wait in line for more than an hour.