Matthew Segal is a pretty typical senior at Ohio’s Kenyon College. Tuesdays through Thursdays, that is. But for the past academic year, he’s spent every Friday through Monday jetting across the country, mostly to Washington, to run a nonprofit he founded last year.

It’s in his D.C. home away from school where Segal runs the Student Association for Voter Empowerment, or SAVE, which works to improve student voting access on college campuses.

The suburban Chicago native got the activist bug after volunteering at a campus polling place at Kenyon during the 2004 elections. State officials had apportioned too few machines to the campus precinct, and students stood in line for hours — some, up to 13 hours — with the last voter finishing at 4 a.m. Many simply gave up and went home without voting.

Having witnessed the debacle, Segal decided to work on preventing such problems in the future. “Whereas other people got frustrated but resigned to it, I resolved to do something about it,” said Segal, who began speaking at events around the country on behalf of student voting rights.

He and other students went on to launch SAVE in 2007. In addition to establishing local chapters on campuses, the group works to raise national awareness of youth vote issues. For instance, it signed an amicus brief opposing the Indiana voter identification requirement that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld on April 28.

Now, at 21, Segal leads a dual existence, and his college friends say he manages it adroitly.

“On campus, he’s known as a guy who works his tail off constantly,” said Charlie Bitterman, a friend at Kenyon who works with SAVE. “But what’s great about Matt is that he’s able to balance his life.”

Sadie Rubin, another friend and fellow activist at Kenyon, agreed. “He does manage — I don’t know how he does it — to have a relatively normal life when he’s back on campus.”

Segal does go out most weekend nights. But he isn’t going to college keg parties. Instead, he’s hitting the bar scene in the nation’s capital with other young professional activists. And that’s after a day of shuffling paperwork in his snazzy L Street office, having meetings on the Hill or lunching with political and media players.

Prior to a recent interview with Politico, for instance, he had just returned from dining with Judy Woodruff to discuss a possible segment on SAVE and voting protection issues for PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” He also met earlier this week with Howard Gantman, staff director of the Democratic Senate Rules Committee, to urge him to hold a hearing on youth voter suppression and voter identification laws.
Looking very serious in his business suit, Segal says he’s having the time of his life keeping this hectic schedule. And he insists it hasn’t taken much of a toll on his social life. “I get to see my friends on campus during the week, and I’m often traveling with friends on weekends. College life just isn’t only in Gambier for me.”

The rest of the time, Segal says he enjoys socializing with friends from across the country, both in Washington and when he speaks at colleges in other cities.

“In college, you want to meet people from all over and get a grasp of life, and I think he’s getting that not just through his studies at Kenyon but through his experiences on other campuses,” said Ian Storrar, director of youth and volunteer programs at Common Cause, who knows Segal through their work together in Washington.

So how did Segal wind up leading such an unusual college life?

It started after the 2004 election, when he witnessed the voting problems at Kenyon. That experience later led to his work as a field producer on Oscar nominee Dorothy Fadiman’s feature documentary “Stealing America: Vote by Vote,” about irregularities in that election.

His interest and growing connections on civil rights and voting rights issues helped him land a semester-long job in 2006 at the NAACP in Washington, where he researched youth civic participation and minority voting rights. He worked as a legislative assistant without pay on reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. The highlight of all his time in Washington was attending the bill signing ceremony at the White House.

The following fall, he went to England to study literature. “The notion was that I wanted to take a semester abroad,” he said.

Segal claims that academics are the one area in his life he’s truly had to sacrifice — other than sleep. He sleeps only three to four hours a night and has forgone his double major, dropping English and focusing just on sociology.

But Segal’s grades were high enough for him to earn a place in a study abroad program at Oxford. The problem was that he didn’t enjoy it because he missed working in Washington.

“I did not like Oxford,” Segal said. “Oxford was so theoretical. I was like, ‘I want to be back in D.C.’ I would read The New York Times and feel apart from my work there.”

So Segal began working with friends to launch SAVE, which is in the process of gaining full nonprofit tax status. They assembled a board of directors comprising veteran politicians, activists and other Beltway royalty whom Segal had met through his previous work in the capital. Prominent members include former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) and Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift. Board members then connected the group with wealthy potential donors.

And last May, SAVE got a little help from a friend when it opened its Washington headquarters within the offices of the Forest City real estate firm, which is run by the mother of one of SAVE’s co-founders.

After graduation in mid-May, Segal plans to take three weeks off to decompress and maybe go on a golf trip with his high school buddies. “Now that he’s about to graduate, he’s trying to get his last hurrah in,” said Bitterman.

But in June, Segal will move to Washington to run SAVE full time. This summer, the group will work to expand the number of campus chapters (now at 26) and will join with religious and other non-academic organizations to encourage noncollege youth to vote.

Next fall, Segal plans to turn his focus on election protection. “What we saw in Iowa, with out-of-state students having their right to vote questioned, will come around again this fall,” he said.

After a couple of years of living the bohemian group house life in Washington — he’s looking for a place with friends in Adams Morgan or Tenleytown — Segal says he might go to law school. Meanwhile, he’ll be working to build SAVE into a self-sustaining organization and one that he hopes will eventually become unnecessary.

“I want to put myself out of business,” said Segal. “I hope there’s no need for someone like me, but unfortunately there is.”