Many students will be voting for the first time this Election Day, and some, like Kirstina Argiroff, a freshman in the First Year College, said the ease of early voting will make more turn out at the polls.
“Early voting will really help out,” she said. “If someone has something planned on Election Day, they can just come to one of the early voting sessions. It’s also good that there are several days for early voting, in case you try to make one and have something come up.”
The Pullen Arts Center’s early voting station will open Oct. 16, with Nov. 1 as the final early voting day.
Though he expects voter turnout to increase some, Travis Overton, a freshman in civil engineering, said he doesn’t think the voter turnout will be significantly different.
“Early voting will give people more time to come out and vote so it’ll definitely increase voter turnout some, but I’m not sure it’ll be a huge difference,” Overton said. “For the most part, I think it’s going to be the same people who are going to go vote anyway. They’ll just vote on different days so they can beat the crowds.”
Overton also said he believes more young voters will come out and cast their ballots because of the political environment they’ve grown up in.
“Younger people are taking more of an interest in politics than before,” he said. “Most of us can still remember where we were when 9/11 happened and that’s been an extremely hot topic while we were growing up. Young people are learning more about the government because of everything that we see on the news.”
Popular culture may have an effect on students’ participation in politics, according to Brian Statler, a junior in civil engineering.
“I think young people are more politically active now because of MTV,” Statler said. “Especially last year, I remember MTV pushing hard to get young people to vote. Every time you watched something on MTV you saw several ads for Rock the Vote and other voting initiatives.”
Statler also said several of his friends hadn’t heard about early voting, and he believes the board of elections should better inform people about it.
“The [board] needs to get it out there with stuff like putting it on the news or sending out emails with information,” he said.
Overton said it shouldn’t be too difficult to inform most of campus about early voting.
“They need to spread the word more,” Overton said. “They need to do the normal stuff like put out ads and banners and go around and talk to people and maybe even wide spread e-mails or messages on Facebook. If nothing else, people can learn about it through the word of mouth.”
