A newly created student group is attempting to increase the number of voters in this week’s Student Association election.
UVote was started in late January by freshmen Gina Fernandes and Maggie Beckham, who said they felt the low voter turnout of previous years was “appalling.” Last year, 10 percent of students, or about 2,100 undergraduates and graduates, voted in the SA election. UVote is trying to increase that number by 2,000 votes.
“We, as new kids on the block, found this hard to believe because we go to the school for political junkies and expected the campus to be much more involved than it was,” said Beckham, the group’s vice president.
Beckham said that in order to bolster the number of voting students, her organization and its “handful” of mostly freshmen volunteers will encourage student organizations to sponsor candidates, hold candidate events and inform their members on how and why to vote. Members of UVote will also distribute flyers around campus prior to the election to get the word out to students.
“Our goal is to contact 100 student organizations before the election to tell them to tell their members to vote,” said Fernandes, the group’s president.
Fernandes said that by getting more voters, SA candidates would not be able to count on votes from specific student groups that support them and would have to increase campaigning to students not affiliated with an organization.
“On top of having voter apathy, the people running for office don’t want students to vote because they have promises from certain student groups to get their votes,” she said.
While GW may have a relatively low number of voters for its student government, other colleges across the country have similar participation rates. Last year, 2,014 out of 16,808 students voted for their student representatives at Western Kentucky University. The University of Missouri college newspaper reported that 3 percent of its student population participated in the school’s 2004 election.
Columbia University has one of the highest voter participations in the country, with 38 percent of its student body taking part in government elections.
Fernandes and Beckham made it clear that UVote, which resembles the GW Votes group that sought to register students to vote in the 2004 presidential election, is not beholden to any specific candidate.
“(We are) about getting people to vote without being obnoxious or harassing them,” Fernandes said.
To ensure the organization’s objectivity, it is under the auspices of the Joint Elections Committee, which oversees the SA, Marvin Center Governing Board and Program Board elections.
“UVote is students helping out with a committee to publicize the election in a non-biased way,” said a JEC member who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It doesn’t favor candidates, it doesn’t favor a slate.”
While the creators of UVote will be only witnessing an SA election for the first time Wednesday and Thursday, they have experience with the student governing body. Fernandes and Beckham applied for positions as freshman senators, but only the latter was selected. Fernandes has remained active in the SA, however, by attending bi-weekly Senate meetings.
Fighting voter apathy may be a daunting task, but Fernandes said she is still optimistic about her group’s prospects.
“It could be very successful because a lot of people hear about us or because of the buzz from the national election,” she said. “Or we could have the same people vote that vote every year, but we haven’t done as much as I would have liked to hope.”
-Brandon Butler contributed to this report.
