In a busy corner of Monday’s ASG Fall Activities Fair, hundreds of Northwestern students registered to vote and requested absentee ballots.
A nonpartisan coalition of student groups dedicated to increasing NU’s voter turnout in the November election coordinated the voter outreach effort. The group, NU Decides, formed during the summer when NU Voter Outreach and NU Engage joined forces.
Weinberg junior Allison Morales founded NU Voter Outreach during Spring Quarter after researching minority voting patterns for Asian/Asian American Student Affairs. Associated Student Government created NU Engage to register NU students to vote. NU Decides includes a variety of other student groups, including Americans for an Informed Democracy, College Democrats and College Republicans.
Kim Castle, Communication junior and volunteer coordinator for NU Decides, said she thinks November’s election provides an opening for students to have their voices heard.
“We have a real opportunity to get politicians to pay attention to young people, and the best way that we can make that happen is registering a lot of young people and getting people out to vote,” she said.
Erik Smith, an organizer with Illinois Public Interest Research Group who is working with NU Decides, said students on campuses nationwide are becoming more involved in the political process. The turnout for voters ages 18-29 tripled in Iowa during the 2008 caucuses compared to 2004, he said. In the Tennessee primaries, it quadrupled.
“You have both parties actively going after the youth vote,” said Smith, 24. “They’re really starting to engage young people on the issues that matter to us,” including higher education, climate change, energy, the economy and health care.
Although young voters have become more active, some students like Jilian López, programming chair for NU Decides, think that there is plenty of room for improvement.
“Universities as a whole aren’t as informed as they should be,” said López, a Weinberg sophomore. “This is a really great opportunity for Northwestern to be a leader in this election.”
NU Decides is planning a “blitz week” of aggressive registration efforts starting Monday. It is also encouraging unregistered voters to go to studentvote.org, where they can register online.
The group is entering NU into the Ultimate College Bowl, a nationwide competition to see which campus can register the most voters. The winning school will get a free concert from Death Cab for Cutie, the band performing at an A&O Productions show Oct. 10.
Erin Hickey, a sophomore in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, said that requesting an absentee ballot took her five minutes at the activities fair.
“I’m glad they had it so that I got that done,” Hickey said.
Morales said that NU Decides aims to make the registration process, which can seem daunting, as easy as possible for busy college students.
“(Students) don’t know that they can use a dorm address, they don’t know where to go (to vote),” Morales said. “That’s why we’re telling them: Yes, you can use your dorm; yes, you do have polling sites on campus.”
Tedd Vanadilok, director of Asian/Asian-American Student Affairs, called the NU Decides program “a welcome sight to see.”
“It shows we can collaborate,” Vanadilok said. “We can rally around something much bigger than ourselves.”
