Students in a Government Class Publish Voters' Guide for Young People

The Maine Voter Guide is especially geared to young people, said Ava Arepally '27, sharing her peers' objectives for the site.

"As we talked, we came up with the main issues that affect a lot of people's lives-especially college students-like abortion and women's reproductive rights," she said. "And we talked about what it is going to be like for us post-college, and affordable housing is something a lot of us are stressed about, along with the climate crisis and gun violence."

The group divvied up candidates to ask them about their stances on these four issues and what they would like a younger electorate to know about their plans to address them if elected to office. They were pleased that all of the US Senate candidates and all but one of the US House candidates responded to their solicitations. They also received good response rates from local candidates, according to Arepally.

The student team, which included Arepally, Aleena Nasruddin '26, Charlie Aucoin '27, Idil Ibrahim Aibo '27, John Schubert '26, Lia Busby '25, Merle Hezel '28, Lucia Galdamez '28, Rio Hanson '27, Violet Apodaca '25, and Zara Lall '27, put together the guide in response to an assignment prompt from Ángel Saavedra Cisneros, assistant professor of government, for his course Campaigns and Elections.

On the first day of class, Saavedra Cisneros asked students to choose one of three election-related civic projects to collaborate on with one another and with Bowdoin Votes, the College's nonpartisan voting iniatitive. The options included, besides the voting guide, a registration/turnout drive and a candidate debate or forum. For the latter, a group of students worked with the Bowdoin Democrats and Bowdoin Conservatives to organize a November 2 senatorial debate on campus, which will not include Angus King, unfortunately.

"We do this work to help democracy, and to help our communities be better prepared, to register to vote, and to get out and vote," Saavedra Cisneros said. The course weaves together classroom learning-where students study theory and how institutions and voters shape the voting process-with real-world learning. "They see how it actually happens and learn about the things that we can't read about but can only experience," he said.

For Arepally, a highlight of working on the guide was tracking down Diana Merenda, who is running for US Congress in Maine's second congressional district. Because Merenda doesn't have much of an online presence, Arepally reached out to a local reporter for her contact information. But once they connected, Merenda was excited to chat, according to Arepally. "She's an independent, write-in candidate with not much publicity, and it was important to her to get her voice out there," she said.

After the election, the class will turn its attention to its next big endeavor-researching voter behavior. On November 5, they will split up to conduct an exit poll at voting stations in Brunswick, Topsham, and possibly Lewiston, asking people about the issues that helped direct their vote.

Students came up with eighty percent of the questions for the survey, Saavedra Cisneros said, and will write their final papers on the results they get.

Arepally said that for her paper, she plans to analyze how education, abortion, and rights for transgender people drove voting behavior this year.

She's looking forward to digging into the real-world data. "We're going to take these results from a local election and apply them to all the trends we've learned about with campaigns and elections," she said. "The class has made the process very real and hands-on."