Voter Registration is an Issue

Our team conducted three focus groups during the week of October 15, 2007. With a diverse group of people, the focus groups enabled our team to ask students whether or not they vote, their reasons for voting/not voting, and different voting tactics that are effective. One of the main ideas we took away from the focus group is it seems that the problem regarding low youth voter turnout can be partly attributed to the fact that many students are not registered to vote. It turns out that some students do not even know how or where to register. One student claimed that they only reason he registered was because his friend wanted to – and knew where to.
Perhaps the issue of low youth voter turnout is not an issue of apathy. In his article, Campus voting access not making the grade, Ben Adler asserts that, “Turnout on college campuses has been depressed by some simple but strong barriers.” Some students cannot register to vote, some do not have the time to wait in long lines, and others are turned away because they do not have proper identification.
Voter ID laws require voters to have proper identification when voting. But some students do not have a proper form of ID, or they do not think to bring it with them when voting. Furthermore, there Registration – however many students in college do not reside at their permanent address.
Long lines are also a problem. Many of our friends wanted to vote at Stamp but simply could not wait in the lines that were backed up for hours. Even participants in our focus groups were turned off by all of the waiting. The President of our Student Government, Andrew Friedson, claims that the process that sets the number of voting machines before the registration deadline acts too quickly. On college campuses, where students arrive in September and may not register until the last minute, it can result in having too few voting machines. Friedson and other student leaders are advocating a state bill to make more machines available on our campus. The bill would also “give each student a fixed in-state address for the purpose of voting.”
These are important factors that team VOTE-CP must keep in mind when continuing with our research. We predicted that long lines at Stamp were a major source of low voter turnout, and it is encouraging to learn that we are fighting for more voting machines. The problem of low registration is something we may want to tackle – the sooner we can get students registered, the more likely we are to increase the machine count at Stamp. Hopefully more machines would lead to a higher turnout in 2008.
In the next weeks, our team will further analyze focus group results and begin developing our survey.

--Alka Jhaveri