Out of approximately 12,000 students enrolled at Western, 20 people, most of them aged 18-25, gathered in Viking Union 567 on April 14 to hear Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed discuss voter apathy and lack of youth turnout in national, state and on-campus elections.
Reed’s visit was part of the Third Annual College Civics Week meant to get young voters on campus excited about the democratic process.
Western was one of 28 stops on the secretary’s five-day tour of Washington colleges.
Reed said the small turnout of Western students was typical of the other schools he visited earlier that day and most of the students he met with were actively engaged in politics anyway.
Reed said his target audience is the students that do not vote because they feel there is no immediate gratification or feel their vote will not make any difference.
"The 18-24-year-old crowd is registering and voting less than the rest of the electorate," Reed said. "We do not have a clear reason for this but we are doing everything we can to keep voters informed on the issues and how to register."
Voter apathy has been a significant problem in Associated Students elections in previous years, AS Vice President for Legislative and Governmental Affairs Erik Lowe said.
With the impending AS Spring Elections, Lowe asked Reed what could be done to get Western students to participate in campus elections that affect them so immediately.
"It seems that the students would be very active in selecting their student body representatives," Reed said.
"Students are selecting who is going to manage their funding and what activities the university will engage in, so they should take the election seriously because it will decide a huge part of their daily lives."
Besides fitting voting into a busy school schedule, Reed credited the low youth-turnout in Washington State elections to a lack of trust in vote handling procedures in recent national and state elections, something Reed said his office is trying to change.
One example Reed discussed was the 2004 gubernatorial race between then-Attorney General Christine Gregoire and Sen. Dino Rossi.
In the contested election, 2.6 million votes were recounted by machine and hand, the margin between the two candidates was only 133 votes which is a mere fraction of a percent of the voting population.
"To prevent that from happening again, we have moved the September primary to August, to give more time to count the votes accurately, as well as merged our registration process with the national social security database to prevent voter fraud and we are also one of two states in the nation that have online registration," Reed said.
Those changes seem to be making a difference according to the statistics.
Reed said his office saw a 22 percent increase in youth-voter turnout from 2000-04, and he said he expects an increase in those numbers in elections taking place later this year.
Lindsay Pryor, Coordinator for College Civics Week said the increasing role of technology in elections such as the use of YouTube videos about voting, Facebook and MySpace pages and TV commercials that parody Sir Mix-A-Lot’s "Baby Got Back," are getting the message out to more students than ever before.
Pryor said she herself had recently registered and voted for the first time and felt a bit guilty for waiting so long.
She reminded the small crowd while she passed out various buttons, bracelets and collapsible Frisbees emblazoned with the word, “Vote!,” that voting is not about instant gratification, but that the democratic process takes time.
Lowe and AS Elections Coordinator Ben Murphy organized the event by advertising on the Facebook group Western Votes!, made up of politically active students on campus, but they could not get advertisements placed around campus in time which could account for only 20 people attending the discussion, Murphy said.
Murphy is trying to restructure the AS election process so that an election on issues that concern Western students, such as tuition costs and the environment, can be brought to attention earlier.
That way, when AS Spring elections are held, people will be better informed.
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