It’s an adage of American voting behavior that, the older you are… the more likely you are to vote. Student activists in Virginia are trying to change that, but it isn’t easy.
Julia Billingsly, is Director of Virginia 21 at Virginia Tech, a non-profit, non-partisan group active at all 13 public, 4-year colleges in Virginia.
For months, she’s been asking everyone on campus, who will listen. And she kept at it until the very last day before the deadline to register, the very last hours in fact, she was in the Squires Student Center.
Turbovote is an online voter registration link that anyone can use, any time to register. That means people who missed that deadline can still sign up to be ready for next year’s elections. Billingsley expects a higher ‘yes’ rate next time around because this is not only an off year. It’s not even an off, off year, according to Virginia Tech Political Science Professor Jason Kelly it’s an….
“It’s an off, off, off year election.”
Kelly points out, not only is there no presidential election – that’s an off year, there’s also no gubernatorial race, an off, off year,
“And in the off, off, off year, that one year every 4, we have just the local elections, the state senate and the House of Delegates."
Kelly admits his catch phrase hasn’t really caught on. But there is a definite drop in voting by all age groups with all those ‘offs’. Kelly says in presidential years, around 72% of registered voters in Virginia turn out. That's higher than the national average. But in an off, off, off year, like this, only about 30% typically do. Kelly says it can take a while before voting becomes a habit.
“We actually use 3 elections in a row. When we see people vote 3 times in a row then we expect them to continue voting because our studies show that they tend to continue voting and they also continue, if they voted the same way in those 3 elections, they tend to continue voting for that same party.”
As for Julia Billingsley and Virginia 21, they don’t care which party you vote for on that you exercise that right. Before the deadline to register for this election passed, Julia Billingsley and her group had helped seven hundred Virginia Tech students register online with Turbo vote, and another 700 with the help of a group called NextGen.
“We take pride in it because we think, that’s 1400 students that were not able to register (easily, if not for us) and we were out here doing it every single day, so it’s a good feeling.
It’s too late to register for tomorrow’s election, but hey, while you’re thinking of it, the web address to register for the next one isTurbovote.org.
