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Students and administrators travel to Harvard to learn about political engagement

September 29, 2015


Photo: Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service

This weekend, Sept. 25-27, a group of two students and two staff members from the Georgetown Institute for Politics and Public Service (IPPS) attended “Campus Activation: Increasing Student Voting and Political Engagement,” a conference hosted by the Harvard Institute of Politics. The conference consisted of several seminars, focus groups, and talks focused on the theme of voter registration and participation.

The conference, whose attendees hailed from 28 universities across the United States, was heavily focused on voter registration and participation on college campuses.

“This conference was an opportunity to bring together students and administrators from similar programs around the country to learn from one another. How different campuses are approaching the issue of voting, voter registration, voter participation, what’s working, what’s not and to see if there’s any way we can help.” said Mo Elleithee (SFS ‘94), executive director of the IPPS

Naomi Lim (MPP ‘17) and Cole Horton (SFS ‘18), members of the Institute’s Student Advisory Board, also attended the conference. According to Horton, the importance of voting was a key theme during the conference.

“I learned that students don’t vote as much as they should, and I’m one of those students who doesn’t realize how important it is to vote,” Horton said.

Lim hopes to apply her new knowledge about voting to the work of the IPPS. “One of the things that I learned is the importance of following up. [The IPPS is] trying to grow [its] contact with students, and [it is] getting lots of students’ email addresses, but it’s important to follow up,” Lim said.

The IPPS plans to use its new information about voter registration and participation techniques to prepare students to vote in 2016.

“The IPPS would like to increase voter registration on campus. We’re going to get a sense of how many students are already registered to vote, and there’s data available on [Georgetown’s voter registration numbers] at Tufts University… We’re going to use that information to find out how we can attract more students who aren’t necessarily politically-minded to vote,” Horton said.

However, Horton noted a unique challenge to a voter registration program in Washington, D.C. “A lot of students don’t want to vote in D.C. because D.C. is kind of inconsequential,” Horton said.

According to Elleithee, increasing student voting fits neatly into the IPPS’s goals. “One of the reasons I came to Georgetown [as a student] was for access, but I felt like I had to go out and find it. We want to bring the access here so that students here would be able to access the players in our political system on a daily basis,” he said. “The single most important way to get engaged in the political system is simply through voting.”

Both Horton and Lim hope to see improvements in students’ voter participation rates in the future.

“People dismiss [our generation] as being disengaged or spoiled, but [the conference] was a testament to the fact that not all of us are,” Lim said.



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