January 23, 2008
J.M. BROWN
SENTINEL STAFF WRITER
"Hey, are you registered to vote?" asks a chipper Lisa Straehley, who is dressed in a patriotic pirate's outfit.
Polling places at UC Santa Cruz
* Oakes College Learning Center.
* College X Namaste Lounge.
* Cowell College Apartments Community Room.
* Crown/Merrill Colleges Community Room.
* Porter College Apartments I Lounge.
* Stevenson College Library.
Pop Out |
"No," is the polite reply from a man hurriedly cutting across UC Santa Cruz's Quarry Plaza.
"Well, you want to be?" she asks excitedly, her clipboard at the ready. "Not particularly," he responds.
But neither voter apathy nor patches of rain could keep the
first-year politics student from registering as many fellow students as
possible for the Feb. 5 presidential primary before Tuesday's deadline.
Young undergraduates is an age group candidates and voting advocates
are always courting.
"We live in a democratic republic; this is where our power comes from, is to vote," Straehley said.
She and other volunteers participating in the New Voters Project
with the nonpartisan California Public Interest Research Group, or
CALPIRG, have registered several hundred voters during campus visits
since Thursday. The group hit dorm halls over the weekend and dining
halls during the dinner rush Tuesday before hauling registration cards
down to county headquarters before midnight.
Potential voters were encouraged Tuesday not to register absentee
this late in the game. But not to fear, there are six polling places on
campus.
The volunteers tried to make registering as easy and fun as
possible. The velvet blue vest Straehley wore atop a billowing white
shirt -- finished off by a red sash around her waist -- was meant to
stand out amid the flurry of activists who frequently dot Quarry Plaza
competing for student consideration.
"That was the plan, but it's Santa Cruz, so some think it's just people dressing funny," she chuckled.
Still,
Straehley said most unregistered students whom she approached outside
Bay Tree Bookstore agreed to stop and fill out the registration form,
which only took a couple of minutes. She said she hopes students
realize their complaints about politics or the choices of their
government are meaningless unless they engage in the process. | SCS_showAdsByZone(21);
var zflag_nid="162"; var zflag_cid="717/1"; var zflag_sid="463"; var zflag_width="300"; var zflag_height="250"; var zflag_sz="9";
|
"You're not doing anything about it unless you vote," she said.
Laurel Nelson, a third-year environmental studies student, said she
appreciated the in-your-face reminder to exercise her Constitutional
right.
"It makes it so much easier" to fill out the form on campus instead
of rushing to the county elections office, Nelson said. "I meant to do
it beforehand."
Democrat and Republican party representatives also have been registering students in recent days.
"Usually people ignore you, but when they hear that it's the last
day, their ears perk up," said Josh Zulli, publicity director from the
College Democrats.
Candace DesBaillets, a spokeswoman for CALPIRG, said history shows
young people respond to a peer-to-peer appeal to register. But because
the real trick is actually getting voters to cast a ballot, DesBaillets
said her organization will twice remind students via text messages,
e-mail and phone calls to vote.
Last year, according to its Web site, the nonprofit New Voters
Project registered 75,000 young voters on 80 college campuses for the
2006 election.
Contact J.M. Brown at 429-2410 or jbrown@santacruzsentinel.com.
