Group Aims To Turn Students Into Voters Registration Efforts Begin On Idaho And Washington State Campuses

On the political landscape, college students are a sort of hippopotamus - a potentially powerful force that rarely rouses itself.

A group of Washington State University students aims to change that. The students plan to register 4,000 students in time for November’s election.

“You can only have a true democracy if everyone participates,” said John Musella, a WSU junior studying public relations.

Registration started this week in dorms, fraternities and sororities.

Students are a potentially huge voting force in Whitman County, which has 24,000 registered voters.

“We’re 17,000 members of this community,” Musella said. “I think they (local politicians) are actually going to have to acknowledge that students are part of the city of Pullman.”

In Moscow, home to the University of Idaho, Latah County Auditor Susan Petersen said her office will set up a voter registration table at the university library in September. Before the 1992 presidential election, workers there registered 800 UI students in one day a significant number in a county with 20,000 voters.

She also expects a student registration drive from UI students this year.

Voter registration drives are a hardy perennial on campus - well-intentioned efforts that often falter when students don’t vote.

To ensure that students fill out a ballot, Musella and others are pushing Whitman County to hold elections by mail. Such “Vote By Mail” experiments have dramatically increased voting elsewhere.

It’s not that students don’t care about politics, it’s that they’re new to voting and aren’t familiar with the process, said Matt Caires, president of Associated Students of WSU. He’s also a Pullman city councilman.

“Students don’t know what it takes to register, what a precinct is, or a primary. They’re overwhelmed by classes and their schedule,” he said.

WSU students have an ally in Eugenia Goldsworthy, the Whitman County auditor. “This is the first time in at least 60 years that the students are this organized,” she said.

The Washington Legislature recently allowed a two-year trial period for counties to hold elections by mail. That window expired June 30, Goldsworthy said.

The students plan to lobby the Legislature to permit it again. The students got the all-Republican Whitman County Commission - which is lukewarm on the idea of students voting - to send a supportive letter to Olympia.

On the plus side, Goldsworthy said, voting by mail is convenient. In Oregon in January, more than 65 percent of voters cast a ballot in the nation’s first-ever congressional election by mail. Normal turnout there is around 40 percent.

In the long run, Goldsworthy said voting by mail should also be cheaper.

“A lot of people today are the drive-in generation. They don’t have time to go to the polls,” she said.

The minuses, Goldsworthy said, include difficulties knowing when to remove a voter from the mailing list and the loss of Election Day culture.

“(Voting) is a social thing,” said Goldsworthy. “It’s apple pie and the fabric of rural America.”

For now, WSU students are taking advantage of the state’s liberal absentee ballot rules. Many students who register to vote this fall will also request absentee ballots, making voting easier. As Musella puts it: “We don’t need Vote-By-Mail to vote by mail.”

How a surge of student voters would affect Whitman County politics is anybody’s guess. The conventional wisdom is that students would be far more liberal than the county’s rural farmers.

“There’s a fear factor. It will change things,” predicted Goldsworthy. “A bloc of 500 voters can change things in this county.”

But both Caires and Musella describe themselves as conservative Republicans. “I don’t think there’s going to be that big of a shift,” said Musella. “There are a lot of conservative students at WSU.”

Goldsworthy also said that research suggests voting by mail actually helps Republicans more.

Caires said the far-right and far-left students at WSU vote already. It’s the students in the political middle, he suggests, who would be added to the mix.

, DataTimes