GRC: Vote for change

A few days ago, I received my ballot. I sat there bewildered by the number of options in front of me. To me, this is exciting. I’m a political science student, so I live for this stuff, but I couldn’t help but wonder what other students must feel.   

I’m worried about the general sentiment that is growing around voting among my peers. When Inside Higher Ed did a flash survey on 1,000 students who planned to not vote, they found seven out of 10 said the biggest reasons were their vote didn’t matter, they disliked the candidates or they were “turned off” by politics.  

These are all reasonable concerns, but I’d like to push back beginning with the sentiment that voting doesn’t matter. Students often say this because of the Electoral College, assuming because their state is dominated by a single party, their vote won’t have any significance. I disagree. In my lifetime, fueled in part by younger voters, Arizona and Georgia have both become swing states. If you are dissatisfied with Utah’s political environment, vote.  

I asked some experts about this issue to gain a broader perspective. One of the experts that responded to my request was Owen Fiss, a legal scholar and sterling professor emeritus at Yale Law School. He has written multiple books and several of the most cited law review articles of all time.   

“Elections make us free because they give us the power to choose our rulers and in so doing generate a unique and much treasured freedom. In deciding whether to vote, I urge you to think, not about what is in the election for you, but about the significance of the election for the community of which you are part and the opportunity you are being given to take part in the process that generates and accounts for that freedom,” Fiss wrote in an email to me. 

We also need to take local elections into account. If you take a look at your ballot, you will see an array of offices. You might not even know what some do. These offices range from county council positions, the people who create and finalize the budget for Cache County, to the school board, which makes educational decisions for the local school district. Issues such as housing and zoning, education, public safety and taxation are all on the ballot this year. 

To demonstrate the impact your ballot can have, a mayoral race in Sandy, Utah saw Monica Zoltanski win by 21 votes. That’s your impact.  

Students are a key demographic in voting — they are the population most affected by changes. I was curious what created this apathy around voting. I reached out to Joshua Clark, a senior social scientist with the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley to explain some of the troubles students face in voting.  

“In my Institute’s research, we very often hear from young voters that they feel they are not knowledgeable enough, or are overwhelmed and unable to sift through all of the information out there about voting. Young people are often told, whether explicitly or implicitly, that they don’t know enough, that older voters know better, and that voting is not really for them. Often they internalize that rejection, and it makes them in turn want to reject the whole system,” Clark wrote in an email to me. 

Breaking down those barriers, whether they are internal or external, can be extremely difficult. It’s why when we reach high levels of perceived polarization and confusion, we have lower voter turnout. While it is your decision to register to vote and drop off your ballot, it’s also partially the university’s responsibility to ensure their students feel they have opportunities to get politically informed.   

Clark emphasized, “Higher ed should want the young people who they are educating to be able to use their voices effectively, and to be integrated into civic life and the democratic process as early as possible. Being active civically is a habit-forming behavior, especially when you start early.”  

You are the one who decides. We have tools for change in front of us, whether it be our vote or our advocacy in sharing our opinion with local newspapers. The key to creating the change you want to see is closer than you think. Vote.  

 – Ronan Spencer, GRC member

You can contact Ronan at  ronan.spencer@usu.edu