City on a Hill: More candidates, better elections

Freshmen, you’ve just gotten to college and probably are overwhelmed with anticipation of the intellectual engagement and rivers of free alcohol in your near future, but I have a favor to ask of you. I’m asking you to run for political office: not in some far-off future where you’ve developed some brilliant plan to get us back into space with renewable fuel recycled from asbestos. I’m asking you to run now. I want you to become an elected official in D.C. by launching a campaign to join this neighborhood’s reigning overlords, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission.
Each neighborhood in D.C. has its own ANC; Georgetown’s is ANC 2E. Right now, there are seven seats in our ANC, and each seat represents around 2,000 people. Commissioners are elected to 2-year terms, and through the efforts of some very dedicated students, at least one of those commissioners has been a student every year since 1996.
The ANC districts that students hold are being under-utilized. In the past, students have contested seats with residents of the neighborhood, and won them. However, we have never once had an election since 2000 where multiple students have run against each other for an all-student ANC seat.
That’s tragic, because contested elections are critical to getting people to participate in politics in the first place. A study on municipal elections published in 2002 by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California noted that “the degree of competition for the office (measured by the number of candidates) is positively related to turnout,” and the authors concluded that “uncontested elections draw especially few voters.”
Increasing student voter turnout is tricky, though, because students must decide whether to keep their home-state voter registration or to establish residence in the District. Why should a student choose to vote in a non-competitive election in D.C. when they could vote in races for mayorships and congressional seats back home, where their vote surely matters more?
Well, ANCs take votes on issues like liquor licenses, parking and construction permits, and neighborhood recreation, as well as the expansion plans of the University itself. You may not think so now, but since so much of Georgetown students’ social life happens in the houses and bars in the neighborhood around campus, ANC 2E has a lot of power to make life for students at Georgetown easy or difficult if it chooses to.
The problem is, many of Georgetown’s neighbors would like student life to be confined as much as possible. If you walk north into Burlieth (also ANC 2E territory) and see clusters of pink signs boldly proclaiming “Our Homes, Not GU’s Dorm,” it’s because plenty of Georgetown and Burleith residents see students as a loud, party-oriented, and unwelcome intrusion into their neighborhoods with little regard for Georgetown as a community.
Unfortunately, the fact that student political participation has become so slack has only made this argument easier to make. ANC 2E elections generally draw several hundred voters, and students were once able to match these numbers when campaigning against neighbors of the University. However, turnout in our uncontested district, 2E 04, seldom exceeds a few dozen. Our previous commissioner, Aaron Golds, received 48 votes in 2008. Last year, Jake Sticka gathered just nine.
It makes it a lot harder to claim that students are involved in the community and local politics when such a small fraction of us participate in the process.
We, the Georgetown community, need two or three or four or more of you brilliant, qualified freshmen to run against each other come 2012. We need you to try and beat each other. We need you to mount full-scale campaigns, register students to vote, and hold debates against each other. We need you to offer different visions for how the University should relate to the community and to try and persuade each other’s supporters.
In other words, we need you to give students a reason to vote, since in the long run, only students exercising their votes can prove to D.C. residents that we have the right to call ourselves citizens of Georgetown.
Give Sam’s lever a pull at sbuckley@georgetownvoice.com