Going to college and want to vote? You've got options.

College may be where you spend most of your time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can — or should — use it over your family home as your address for registering to vote.

New Jersey law requires you register to vote in the community and county where you have lived steadily for a minimum amount of time. And where you are registered is where you vote, even if you do it not by using a machine but by mailing a ballot.

You can register or re-register, while living on a college campus, and use a college address. But even then, you may decide against it if, for instance, you expect to be home around or on Election Day.

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Students commuting from home to college, or taking online courses, constitute a sizeable slice of any campus population. At Rowan University in Glassboro, for example, about half its 22,000 students fall into one of those two categories. For those students, registering and voting at home probably is the best choice.

“Given the (fact) that 95 percent of our students are from New Jersey, anecdotal evidence points toward them voting at home,” university spokesman Joseph Cardona said. “We have no way to track what students are doing, however.”

Cardona said the campus does not have a polling station or ballot drop boxes.

“All of our election-related activities involve student-run registration and get-out-the-vote mail in campaigns,” Cardona said. Rowan does maintain a website portal with advice and links on where and how to register and vote, though.

A sure way to know in what community you must vote is to read your sample ballot, which is mailed to your registered address before Election Day. It contains the address for your designated polling station.

In New Jersey, you need to have lived at your registered address for at least 30 days before the election in order to vote in it. You only can be registered at one address, and registering in two locations is considered fraud.

If you left home to attend a college in another state, it may make sense to get registered at an address there.

On the other hand, what’s going on in your hometown and home state may be more important to you. In that case, you can vote by absentee ballot rather than trekking home. That requires an extra step of applying for that ballot to be sent to you.

Any change in your dormitory address also requires you to revise your voter registration address.

The deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 5, 2024 General Election is Tuesday, Oct. 15. The deadline to request a mail-in ballot is Tuesday, Oct. 29. Tuesday, Nov. 5 is the deadline to mail the ballot.

Access the N.J. Division of Elections website for more information: https://nj.gov/state/elections/voter-registration.shtml?ref=voteusa_en.

This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Go home, vote at college address? Students can choose