Chris Sanchez
Student Government met Tuesday night with voter registration advisor Harvard Ayers to create a plan to get N.C. State students registered to vote for the November 4 general election.
Ayers, an anthropology professor at Appalachain State University who has had his own successful voter registration drives in Boone said the effort of the NCSU campaign is to increase the number of registered and active voters on campus, which will hopefully lead to more people voting in the general election.
“The first goal of the campaign is to register a total of around 12,000 State students, about 40 percent of the total enrollment,” Ayers said during the SGA meeting. “Our ultimate goal is an equal number (12,000) of actual votes from the approximately 30,000 students.”
According to the Rock the Vote Web Site, the North Carolina deadline for voter registration is October 10. Ayers stressed during the meeting that the push for getting people registered be made during the first few weeks of school in order to maximize the turnout.
Student Government will sponsor the campaign, according to Student Body President Jay Dawkins, but members of various student organizations on campus will be part of a volunteer staff. Members of College Republicans, College Libertarians and College Democrats were on hand for the meeting.
Peter Barnes, sophomore in forest management and president of the College Republicans said a group effort between members of different political groups cannot be overlooked.
“Non-partisanship is direly important,” he said. “Pack the Polls wont be successful with any hint of partisanship. If you don’t have the non-partisan effort, it disenfranchises different groups of people because of the different parties.”
The main focus of the registration campaign will be brief, in class presentations by 35 to 45 students, faculty, and staff that will be trained to register voters.
Students should also expect to see things like booths, sandwich boards and dorm storms pop up across campus once school starts to help get the word out.
“It is something we definitely want to do,” Dawkins said during the meeting. “It is part of our job as student government to increase student advocacy and participation in the democratic process.”
The hope, according to Ayers, is to get these trained individuals into as many as 350 to 400 classrooms within the first few weeks of class, hitting the large enrollment classes first.
It will require people involved in the campaign to train and work for several hours to reach the desired number of classrooms.
Ideally, the campaign would like to see students not yet registered to register themselves in Wake County. The goal for those students already registered in their county of permanent residence is to have them change their registration to make the voting process easier come November.
“It is an important effort to make,” Ayers said. “Chances are one in a million that students will not vote absentee simply because it is so hard to do.”