March 07, 2024 | NEWS | By Anya Potsiadlo
Mar. 5 was this presidential election cycle’s Super Tuesday, meaning the greatest number of U.S. states held their primary elections to nominate the presidential candidates for both the Republican and Democratic parties. For the first time this year, Colorado College students had the opportunity to vote on-campus in the upstairs of Worner Center.
On the website page for CC Votes, a coalition run through the Collaborative for Community Engagement that seeks to educate CC students about voting, our student voting rate in the previous election was 84.6%, the highest of any four-year institution in Colorado. This was, however, for the general election in November, when there is a greater excitement around voting between the two candidates and watching the drama unfold on television. The primary elections tend to have a much weaker voter turnout across America in general, with 27% of registered voters participating on average in presidential elections since 2000. Plus, this specific primary has ignited a sense of complacency in even more voters considering the seeming decidedness of the candidates. According to the Associated Press, “Biden and Trump are the overwhelming front-runners in their bids for a second term.”
Still, considering this was for most CC students their first chance to vote in a presidential election, many headed to the upper level of Worner center to cast their ballots. Dean, a first-year student from Colorado, generally eats his lunch on the couches outside of where the voting center was placed this week. He noted that, especially on Mar. 5, “there were a lot of people, students but also not students” walking in and out of the voting center.
“I heard someone talking about being confused by all these people on the ballot, and I heard someone talking about how they’re glad this was here,” Dean McMichael said of the conversations he overheard.
McMichael himself opted to vote through a mail-in ballot, which he said was helpful in allowing him to research the candidates, of which there were eight in the Democratic race and seven in the Republican race. Because he grew up in Colorado, not only was it easy for him to access his mail in the ballot, but he also wasn’t faced with the decision of whether to re-register to vote in a new state.
Of those who opted to vote at Worner instead of finding a way to submit their mail-in ballot from their home state was Taylor Lynch ‘27.
“I just thought that considering Massachusetts is such a blue state and I’m a liberal voter, my vote would matter a lot more here, and the process is super easy,” Lynch said. As a political science major who has already voted in a Colorado election last November, Lynch knew she wanted to vote in the primary, but was aware that some people needed more of a push, convincing her friends to vote as well.
“Some people I had to convince, but some people were more willing,” Lynch said. “A lot of people just didn’t realize that their vote would matter more here I think.”
Luckily, given the fact that voting in Worner was so accessible for those heading out of Rastall’s, and that the voting center gives students the option to re-register for Colorado on site, many students cited their friends’ pushes as the main reason that compelled them to vote.
“Someone just literally texted me today saying ‘Did you vote today? You can go to Worner,’” said Abe Lipson ’25 as he headed out of the voting center with his souvenir. “I got this sticker now I’m going to flex it hard.”
Faye Burke ’27 wasn’t previously registered because she didn’t know her social security number, but once finding it, she had a similar experience to Lipson. “Without a little push from my friends I probably wouldn’t have ended up voting,” Burke said. “But as someone who wasn’t planning on it but ended up doing it, I think everybody should vote.”
While mail-in ballots can be an option for voters, those who are hoping to re-register for the state that they attend college in don’t always have the option to do so, or even vote on their campuses.
Isabella Yalif, a freshman at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said that she was interested in registering to vote in Tennessee instead of her home state of California, but when asked if she knew of a place to vote on campus, she responded, “not that I’m aware of, because if there was it would be publicized, right?”
Megan Branstad, a student at Claremont McKenna College in southern California, named by the Princeton Review as the number one most politically active college campus in America, had similar trouble finding a place to vote in person. “There was not a place I was aware of to vote on campus,” she said.
With time, more awareness of where to vote, especially for college students, should be publicized as student populous look forward to the Presidential elections this upcoming November.