ADA — Students volunteering with College Republicans, Young Democrats, Pi Sigma Alpha and several classes have begun blanketing ECU with opportunities to register to vote as students arrive back on campus for the fall semester. This non-partisan effort hopes to register 232 students, or 5 percent of the current enrollment of ECU. The ECU project is part of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) multi-state non-partisan project to register 40,000 young voters this election year. The 2006 election cycle is shaping up to be a banner year for youth voter mobilization, with registration campaigns active on more than 150 college campuses and in scores of communities reaching all 50 states. In Oklahoma, the two participating schools are ECU and the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond.
“Registering to vote is one of the most important things adults do. I am so happy to help people to do their duty by helping them register to vote,” said Kyle Foster, a sophomore political science major from Bromide who is also the Chair of the College Republicans.
The campus-wide project began Sept. 18 and will use three strategies to reach its goal by the Oct. 13 deadline for registering before the Nov. 7 election. Student groups will set up more voter registration tables, professors will urge students to register, and students will visit classes with registration forms. Forty-six professors signed their classes up for the project.
Will Irwin, a sophomore political science major from Meeker, said of his participation, “I felt I was doing a great thing, voting is of great importance.”
There is an unprecedented amount of youth-targeted voter registration happening in 2006, a midterm election year, in part spurred by recent turnout increases. “Young adults are huge in number and becoming more and more politically active,” said Assistant Professor Dr. Christine Pappas, voter registration Project Coordinator for ECU. “In 2004, we saw that if you ask young people to register and vote, they will, and this year students and young people are leading voter registration campaigns at more than 150 colleges, including dozens of AASCU campuses, to build on that momentum.”
All students interested in volunteering with this effort can contact Pappas at 310-5640 or cpappas@ecok.edu.
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ECU mobilizes to register students to vote
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