Student leaders say: Vote by mail this year

July 26, 2010 by Haley Etchison 

Nevada Student Alliance to seek candidates’ pledges in support of education

Two new initiatives are gearing up to amplify students’ voices this election season.

One plan will provide voters a way to tag their ballots to show they are concerned about education in Nevada and another will solicit pledges from candidates that they will support education if elected.

The Education Counts initiative asks students and education supporters registered to vote in Nevada to cast their ballots by mail rather than visiting a polling location, allowing them to tag their ballots with a three-letter code that marks their devotion to a specific cause.

The number of ballots bearing a given code can be tallied and the number of declared supporters used as leverage with lawmakers.

If enough students choose to vote by mail and tag their ballots with a code representing education, the benefit could be two-fold.

First, it could show Clark County Election Department officials the value of placing a poll on every college campus in the state – something that they say is currently not a good use of resources, given the average voter turnout to campus locations.

A polling location is already planned for the UNLV main campus, and the West Charleston Library near the College of Southern Nevada’s Charleston Campus will host early voting in November, but student leaders say that is not enough.

J.T. Creedon, student body president at CSN and an organizer of the program, wants to see new early voting locations at his school’s three campuses.

“The big thing is that we have a very, very transient nontraditional student population,” Creedon said. “We are a commuter school.

We’ve got 42,000 students or so who are commuting all day.”
He explained that many of his constituents work as well as attend CSN and take classes on more than one campus. Their priority is getting to their job and making time for school and home responsibilities, so time management is tough.

Creedon claims that early voting options at school are crucial to increasing voter turnout among CSN students.

The vote-by-mail procedure could not only prove current voter turnout, but also increase participation.

“Voting by mail is effective if done right and it won’t decrease voter turnout. It actually has the potential to increase it, because people do it at their convenience,” said Kyle George, president of UNLV’s Graduate and Professional Student Association. He cited the record of the state of Oregon, where all voting is done by mail and turnout is one of the 10 highest among U.S. states.

But most importantly, a measure of the number of education supporters who vote will be a powerful tool in the hands of those who lobby the Nevada Legislature in the name of higher education.

“We also have the additional leverage of saying we represent a voting bloc of Y number of people,” George said.

Organizers of Education Counts hope to have paper mail-in ballots ready for students to download early in the fall semester.

But the idea is still young, and there is a lot of work to be done before students can participate in this specialized voting procedure.

“We will design a ballot request form, get it approved by the election commission and then start publishing [them],” George said.

It remains to be determined whether all students voting by mail will be asked to tag their ballots with the same code (something like “EDU”), or whether voters from different institutions will use different codes (such as “ULV” or “CSN”).

Either way, George explained, “The goal is to get as many people as possible to choose to vote by mail this election cycle.”

To achieve this goal, George plans to work hard at publicizing the choice for student voters.

“We have to explore every possible option,” he said. “We have to use [all available] resources – newspapers, ads, posters, tables.”

Part of the goal of publicity efforts will be to reassure students that their votes will be counted in the same way, no matter which method they use to cast their ballot.

“They don’t track the content of that vote,” George explained. “The vote is still private but they do track that another vote came in under ‘XYZ.’”

George, Creedon and their colleagues recognize that proof of a number of voters dedicated to education is only valuable to the extent that it is reciprocated by support among lawmakers.

So a second initiative seeks to encourage candidates for office to commit to backing education.

The Nevada Student Alliance – the organization of student body leaders from across the Nevada System of Higher Education – is spearheading a project aimed at getting elected officials to notice the NSA and the segment of the electorate that its members represent.

The plan is for every candidate for public office in a race in the November general election to receive a pledge card asking that they promise to support education.

“The pledge card is [an opportunity] for the candidates to say that they support higher education and that higher education is important enough that we need to put effort into saving it,” explained George, who is also chair of the NSA.

The project aims to raise recognition of the NSA as a political voice, while garnering support for the specific causes its members and other students promote with lawmakers.

“We want to make sure that the NSA starts getting recognition statewide since the constitution of the NSA says we are supposed to be the unified voice of students when we go before the legislature,” George said.

He explained that developing name recognition for the NSA will begin to make student activism in the state legislature “not about the individuals like me, but… about the body itself.”

“We’re going to send [the pledge cards] out tagged ‘NSA,’ the Nevada Student Alliance, with logos of every student government on it,” George said.

This will serve to introduce each candidate to the body that represents the collective voices of students in higher education in Nevada.

“We want to ensure that there’s zero dollars cut from higher education,” Creedon said of his and his colleagues’ lobbying efforts.

He also said student leaders aim to protect the future of the Millennium Scholarship, which was saved through spring 2011 with a stopgap transfer from the College Savings Board reserve fund by a vote on Wednesday in the Interim Finance Committee.

The pledge card is modeled after one designed by ASUN, the undergraduate student government at the University of Nevada, Reno, and taken from the idea of the popular call for pledges to not raise taxes.

“I just want to make sure these guys can make an equal and open commitment to education,” Creedon said, alluding to the relationship between state taxes and public education funding.

“We added ‘I do pledge’ or ‘I do not pledge’ so we explicitly force them to go into one of two categories,” George said.

Tying the two initiatives together is an ongoing effort to increase voter registration among students.

“If people aren’t registered to vote yet, they need to register,” George said. “This upcoming election cycle is more important than any other in a long time.”

George said the same goes for the upcoming legislative session.
“The problem with saying that,” he said, “is we’ve said that for a number of years now.”

But the Nevada Legislature will face a $2.5 billion shortfall in the next session. So, George asserts, repetition of the warning makes it no less true – and makes the student action ever more important.