But will they vote?
By Sandy Polhemus
Some level of student voter turnout is expected at today’s city election since there was a push to register voters, according to East Lansing City Clerk Nicole Evans
Twelve hundred students were registered to vote for this year’s election, Evans said. This number is up from previous years.
MSU student voter turnout varies widely from one year to the next, according to Evans. Important variables to voter turnout are who the candidates are and how they are affiliated with MSU.
While in the 2008 presidential election there was an approximate 60 percent student turnout at campus polling locations, no students voted in the 2007 city council elections, according to Evans.
The YouVote campaign began in 2000, according to the YouVote website. YouVote indicates that their role is to inform student voters of their rights and to assist them in getting registered.
Ginny Haas, YouVote’s Director of Community Relations, said in an e-mail that voter turn-out in student precincts was up 20 percent in the 2008 presidential election.
How active YouVote is in getting out the vote depends largely upon the year, according to Haas.
Last year YouVote hosted informational tables in many residence halls and spoke to classes and student groups, Haas said. They also posted posters informing students of where to vote, and had local churches and apartments offer rides to polling locations.
For today’s election, Haas said they repeated their poster campaign.
Dr. June, Vice President of Student Affairs, also sent out an e-mail directing students to the YouVote website. She also informed them of the registering deadline and how to register.
One thing that students need to be aware of is where they are registered to vote, according to Evans. Sometimes students will go to a precinct without looking to see which jurisdiction they are registered in.
Evans recommended students check their voter registration cards to confirm where they need to go to vote.
There are several reasons that some don’t vote in East Lansing, Haas said. One of the major reasons that students cite for not voting in local elections is because they don’t feel that the East Lansing government has an effect on their lives.
Haas also said that there are students that do not register to vote locally because when you register to vote in Michigan, the address on your driver’s license has to match your voter address.
“Students, and often their parents, believe that by having a drivers license in East Lansing they will lose their ability to be dependants on their parents tax forms, and lose their health insurance,” Haas said.
This idea, however, is not true.
Lindsay Petroff, a Human Biology/Spanish major in her fifth year at MSU, said she registered to vote her freshman year. While she didn’t vote that year due to class conflicts, she said that she has voted in other local elections and last years presidential election.
She is registered to vote in East Lansing because she feels it is the responsibility of people that live in an area to be active and know what is going on around them, she said.
Petroff said most of the students that she talks with don’t seem to know what’s going on politically in the East Lansing community or on a global scale.
In a time when information is readily available on the Internet, Petroff said that this ignorance is “not anyone’s fault except our own.”
Sumon Ahmed, a junior medical tech major, said that though he is from Detroit he first registered to vote here and has voted in local elections.
Voting information is not as clear as it could be, because it never seems to be around until it is very close to voting time, Ahmed said. He would like to see more talk regarding candidates and their stances around campus more often so that students could be more familiar with the issues at hand.
Similarly, Petroff said that while information is available to those willing to look for it, she would like to see more information available in the polling locations.
If pamphlets were available to voters detailing the candidates and their stances on issues as they went into to vote, Petroff thinks people would make more conscious and informed decisions when filling out their ballots.
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