This week’s National Voter Registration Day is a rallying point for student engagement

By Sian Wilkerson

With election season in full swing, there's a concerted effort to ensure that Virginia Commonwealth University students are prepared to vote.

National Voter Registration Day is Sept. 17 this year, and VCU Votes - a student-led, nonpartisan initiative launched by the university to increase student voter registration, education and turnout - is gearing up to help students make their voices heard on Election Day on Nov. 5.

This week, VCU Votes, which is on Instagram at @vcuvotes, will set up tables on the Compass. Students can stop by on Tuesday, Sept. 17, between noon and 2 p.m. or on Thursday, Sept. 19, between 1:30 and 4 p.m. to learn how to register. The organization is also preparing a weeklong slate of events in October to mark National Voter Education Week.

But as professor Amanda Wintersieck noted, registering is just the first step. Going to the polls makes the real difference.

"It's important to note that youth voter turnout is among the lowest turnout in America - consistently at around 30% if you're talking about young people enrolled in college, and in the mid-20s if you're talking about all young people," said Wintersieck, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Political Science in VCU's College of Humanities and Sciences. "This matters a lot because, as the research shows us, legislators, those who actually govern, are responsive to voter needs - not to nonvoter needs."

Wintersieck, the director of the college's Institute for Democracy, Pluralism and Community Empowerment, also teaches the VCU Votes class, during which students develop projects to drive voter registration and participation. She spoke with VCU News about the importance of exercising the right to vote and how VCU is encouraging turnout.

Why do students, and young people in general, need to get out to the polls?

We know that sitting legislators cater to those who are known voters. This wouldn't matter necessarily if voter and nonvoter attitudes were the same - that is, if there were an equal distribution of attitudes across groups of voters and nonvoters. But that's not the case. We know that nonvoter attitudes are quite different from voter attitudes.

So if you want your issues addressed in substantive, meaningful ways, and you want politicians to take you seriously in terms of what you say you want, and to turn that into some kind of an actionable item, then you have to, first and foremost, show up and vote.

How does VCU encourage students to register?

Key dates for the November 2024 election

VCU has done a really good job over the last decade of turning the campus into an active and engaged campus. In 2012, we were not doing very well at all, but now we have really high voter registration on our campus. In 2020, we were at 89% of eligible voters who were actually registered to vote, and that's absolutely excellent, given that we know that you couldn't pay 10 or 11% of society to show up and talk about politics.

The university was able to turn this around in a number of ways. One is the VCU Votes coalition, which is a group of faculty, staff and students who are working on voter registration by actively helping and promoting registration through other student clubs and organizations.

Departments are doing their fair bit as well. For example, at VCU orientation with all the parents, one of the things that we pitch in the political science department is, "And are you registered to vote?" It's kind of an all-hands-on-deck method of getting students to register to vote.

So registering is the first step, but voting is a separate concern, right?

Registration isn't really our problem. Voter yield, or the actual percent of registered voters who turn out to vote, is our problem on campus, and that's where we're really trying to work to close the gap.

Registering to vote is a separate process from actually casting a vote. Registration is really easy. On the Institute for Democracy, Pluralism and Community Empowerment's election page, there's a link to the general registrar's website, and it only takes a few minutes.

I want to be optimistic every year and say, "This is going to be the year the youth are going to show up and vote," but the reality is that despite certain trends increasing the number of people registering to vote, the increase in the actual turnout rate among youth voters barely moves at all.

How have you previously tried to boost student voter turnout?

Last year, we had a group of students who helped students create a voter plan. They collected the students' emails, the students got a little piece of swag and then they got emailed pretty much every single day in the days leading up to the election, telling them, "Here's your plan, remember you had a plan, this was your plan." And so when people remember that they have a plan, they feel less inclined to procrastinate, and also it's more likely they'll follow through.

We had another group that worked with the general registrar's office to do a mock election to show students how to fill out a ballot and how to go through the process of voting. For those of us who have voted a lot, this seems not scary, but it's important that we remember that for people doing anything for the first time, there is some fuzziness around how it all works and embarrassment about having to ask for help.

There are small interventions that we can do to help make people more familiar and comfortable with the process of voting, and that's what our students in VCU Votes aim to do.

Early voting is about to start here really soon, and students, particularly students who are registered to vote in a location other than Richmond, really need to be thinking about how they're going to carry through with their vote. Are they planning to go home to vote, or are they going to ask for an absentee ballot? If they're wanting an absentee ballot, they need to get that absentee ballot ordered and turn it around rather quickly.

What happens if a student forgets to register by the deadline but still wants to vote?

In Virginia, we do have same-day voter registration. So even if students missed the Oct. 15 deadline to register to vote, if they are a Virginia citizen, they can still register to vote all the way up to Election Day on Nov. 5. On Election Day, they can go into a polling place and register to vote.

The difference is that they'll have to cast a provisional ballot instead of a normally cast ballot. The difference is that provisional ballots are handled separately, and the local electoral board reviews each provisional ballot during its canvass of votes cast to determine if the vote will be counted.

So I want to remind students that if you don't make it to actually register to vote, that's not the end of the game. You still have other methods of exercising your right.

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