Morehouse College student Marchellos Scott, a Black college student living in Atlanta, performed some political calculus this summer when he registered to vote in Georgia’s Fulton County for this year’s presidential election instead of casting a ballot in his native state.

“I understand that Georgia is a swing state and I want to ensure that I’m giving a lot to keep Georgia blue,” Scott told Capital B Atlanta in July.

The 21-year-old senior from Clarksdale, Mississippi, said he and other members of the Morehouse College Democrats registered more than 100 students to vote during their National Voter Registration Day drive on campus Tuesday.

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz visited Morehouse the same day to help Scott and his peers encourage their classmates to exercise their voting rights ahead of the Nov. 5 election between current Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

The Impact of Black College Students Registering to Vote in Georgia

Scott said convincing Black college students in Atlanta who moved from other states who both live and attend college in Georgia to vote here instead of their hometown has been a key voter engagement strategy this election cycle.

Some of the roughly 41 million young people across the nation who became eligible to vote this year live in Georgia, where the last presidential election was decided by less than 12,000 votes. Many college students like Scott come from partisan red or blue states where their votes won’t have as much influence in the presidential election as they likely will here in Georgia.

“States like Mississippi — it’s not changing anytime soon,” Scott said on Wednesday. “If we have other avenues to vote so that it’s really making an impact, that’s what we told students to do. I think that’s all a part of voter education and voter awareness.”

The office of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says it’s perfectly legal for college students to register and vote here in Georgia as long as they can prove they live here and meet the legal voting requirements. (Must be at least 17.5 years of age, must be U.S. citizens, can’t be actively serving a felony conviction sentence, and can’t have been declared mentally incompetent by a judge.)

Read the full article about registering to vote in Georgia by Chauncey Alcorn at Capital B News.