{"id":120167,"date":"2018-11-09T11:08:26","date_gmt":"2018-11-09T16:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=120167"},"modified":"2024-07-08T14:55:41","modified_gmt":"2024-07-08T18:55:41","slug":"on-election-day-students-help-each-other-get-out-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2018\/11\/09\/on-election-day-students-help-each-other-get-out-the\/","title":{"rendered":"On Election Day, students help each other get out the vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you used the main entrance to Commons on Tuesday, you couldn\u2019t have missed the posters on the doors, spelling V-O-T-E.<\/p>\n

Or the table, staffed by students, full of candy, \u201cI Voted\u201d buttons, and Maine voter guides.<\/p>\n

Or the easel pad that tallied each passing Bates student who had voted, in person or absentee, in the 2018 midterm elections \u2014 127, as of 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

And if for some reason you did miss it, Maya Seshan \u201920 of Wilton, Conn., president of the Bates College Democrats, made sure you got the message.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid you vote?\u201d Seshan called into the flood of students arriving for lunch. \u201cDo you have plans to vote?\u201d<\/p>\n

A passer-by replied that they had, in fact, just voted. \u201cYes!\u201d Seshan said. \u201cHit that tally!\u201d Then there were 128.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

In Commons on Election Day, Maya Seshan \u201920 of Wilton, Conn., shares the message of the day: “Did you vote?” (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

Bates students can choose to vote either in Maine or in their home states, in person or absentee. Many elect the local option, heading to the Lewiston Armory, a short walk down Central Avenue from Commons.<\/p>\n

Plenty of people around campus worked to get out the vote, and to make voting easy. Students walked together to the Armory from the Office of Intercultural Education. Professors reminded their students repeatedly to vote; some arranged their own walkovers.<\/p>\n

The College Democrats, the College Republicans, and the Harward Center, among other groups, walked students to the Armory every half-hour from the opening of the polls to their closing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

President Clayton Spencer joins a group of Bates students in the short walk to the polls on Election Day. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

Seshan said groups like Planned Parenthood Generation Action, Bates Student Action, and various environmental groups have joined in the effort to register students to vote and ensure they voted.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to make sure there\u2019s no way a student goes through their day at Bates today not knowing that it\u2019s Election Day and not understanding their civic responsibility,\u201d Seshan said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One way to do that was by calling to her classmates, again and again, \u201cDid you vote?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI submitted my absentee ballot,\u201d one replied.<\/p>\n

\u201cI voted,\u201d someone else told the table as she picked up a button. \u201cI just wanted the pin.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll vote after work,\u201d someone else promised.<\/p>\n

A child approached the table, eyeing the candy. \u201cI voted,\u201d he insisted. \u201cI\u2019m 21.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Tally marks on an easel pad keep track of Bates voters on Election Day. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

Arianna Fano \u201919 of Lincolnshire, Ill., and Daniel Fichmann \u201919 of New York City added their tallies. Fano chronicled the ways she\u2019d been reminded to vote \u2014 professors reminding her in all her classes, endless posts on social media.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an element of social pressure,\u201d Fano said, \u201cbut in a good way.\u201d<\/p>\n

And plenty of students took the student organizers up on their offer to escort them to the polls. Liza Folsom \u201921 of San Mateo, Calif., joined a small noontime group. Folsom had been excited to find out she could register to vote in Maine. She considered herself voting for people who could not.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels like I\u2019m making a difference,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

If just one ballot wasn\u2019t enough, students could vote in a mock election, conducted by students in Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano\u2019s \u201cPresidential Campaign Rhetoric\u201d course. The polling place was also in Commons.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

On Election Day, Topher Castaneda ’19 of Los Angeles (left) poses with Dylan Metsch-Ampel ’19 of Montclair, N.J., on Alumni Walk. Castaneda was encouraging students to vote, while Metsch-Ampel wore a suit in his role of a campaign manager for a mock presidential election on campus. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Gardner \u201919, the Democratic \u201ccandidate\u201d for president, solicited last-minute votes outside Commons with his trusty campaign dog, Tilley (who actually belongs to Molly Newton \u201911, assistant dean of students for residence life and health education ).<\/p>\n

By 2:30 p.m., when the rain that had threatened all day was making good on its promise, the tally marks topped 300 \u2014 \u201cone in six,\u201d observed Aimee Oakes \u201920 of Asheville, N.C., who volunteered to walk students over from Commons. By the next day, the tallies ran onto another sheet of paper.<\/p>\n

Seshan left for a class but said she\u2019d take the rowing team to the polls later that evening \u2014 a coxswain, she wanted to create a culture of voting among her younger teammates. <\/span><\/p>\n

By then, Commons traffic had slowed to a trickle, and the answer to the day\u2019s big question \u2014 \u201cDid you vote?\u201d \u2014 was, more and more, \u201cYep, already voted!\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe want to make sure there\u2019s no way a student goes through their day at Bates today not knowing that it\u2019s Election Day.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":120200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[30,195,11012],"tags":[1372,1416,4087],"class_list":["post-120167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-civic-engagement","category-news-politics","category-student-life","tag-bates-college-republicans","tag-bates-democrats","tag-harward-center-for-community-partnerships"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1005"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120167"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120320,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120167\/revisions\/120320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}