National Voter Registration Day, on Creighton’s campus took form in ice cream refreshments on the the record 100 degree early-fall day.
Creighton’s Political Science department partnered with the League of Women Voters – Nebraska section to encourage Creighton students to register to vote. League of Women Voters members Mary Green, Mary Fieber and Dorris Heaston ran the booth to help en-courage the student passerbys to vote in the upcoming 2022 Midterm election.
Candidates Don Bacon (R) and Tony Vargas (D) are up for election in District 02, Omaha. Meanwhile, candidates Mike Flood (R) and Patty Brooks (D) are up for election in District 01.
Richard Witmer, PhD, a Political Science professor, helped to organize the event that encouraged the importance of registering to vote.
Midterm elections generally experience lower turnout and because of that a single vote counts more, said Witmer. He used the rough numbers of 70 million in Presidential versus 35 million in Midterm elections.
“Student loan debt, education [..] abortion for young people is more or less on the ballot,” he said. The topical issues have the opportunity to be discussed at the state level with the voice of the student voter.
“We know that young people often have diff erent ideas about that [topical issues] than others,” said Witmer.
This statement was echoed by Political Science department professor, Erika Moreno, PhD, a student-voter herder even after the event ran out of ice cream an hour in.
“I saw something the other day, someone was referring to the US as a gerontocracy, you’ve got political elites that don’t really look like most Americans, it’s a fairly young country and yet, our leaders are not,” said Moreno.
“Don’t get me wrong there’s a lot to be gained from every age group and generation but it seems like this generation needs to be represented.”
Which is why when asking if a student wants to register to vote, a simple “no,” hurts a bit more.
Moreno introduced the League of Women Voter’s briefl y speaking to their non-partisan approach to education of voters and how they focus on every coverage of every election, because they all matter.
“It’s really easy to focus only on the Presidential race, every four years we worry about that and then we forget about it, wash our hair and move on.”
Dorris Heaston, a League of Women Voter’s member has been washing her hair of the past presidential elections since 1998, when her membership started with the organization.
Heaston shared that she is somewhat of a legacy member and that her mother had belonged to the organiziation. She spoke on the deeply generational ties the organization has fostered, bringing grandmothers, mothers and daughters together to educate themselves on the candidates up for election.
“That’s how the league got started, after women got the right to vote, it was teaching them about the candidates and issues so that they could vote for what they felt was their best interest.”
Part of the League of Women Voter’s mission is to preserve the democratic process and transparency in government while educating voters.