WASHINGTON — It was an August morning at Howard University, and the freshmen were coming. This particular Saturday was move-in day, a time when new students settle into their new home. And so they descended, arriving with bright futures, eager parents and piles (and piles and piles and piles) of dorm-room essentials.
An endless line of cars pulled up to the curb. Families spilled out onto the grounds. Mr. and Miss Howard University showed up. So did Howard’s cheerleaders.
Amid all the joyful chaos was a table stacked with fliers. Here, a student could pick up a list of important campus telephone numbers. Or, if they grabbed a small blue handout, students could learn how to get information about elections and absentee ballots, and about a website that would help with all of that.
Welcome to Howard. Don’t forget to vote.
“We have a civic duty,” Howard’s president, Wayne A.I. Frederick, said. “Our motto is truth and service, and that service part of it also means that we have to exercise our civic duty to vote.”
As the midterm elections approach and an academic year begins, Howard’s student government is working to emphasize the importance of casting a ballot — and not necessarily in the District of Columbia. The initiatives are helping students figure out how to cast absentee ballots in elections back home, sometimes in states where a vote can directly affect the balance of power in Congress.
Amos Jackson III, president of the Howard University Student Association, called these election-related efforts the “top priority” for student leaders. At the university in Northwest D.C., students can sign up to use a service known as TurboVote, an app that sends notifications about upcoming elections. That app was touted on the move-in day handout.
“These are the types of things that our alums, our administrators, our students are dedicated to, and are always going to be dedicated to,” Jackson said.
Tapping technology
This focus on civic duty is not happening just at Howard. College campuses across the country are expected to roll out similar efforts for their students in the coming months.
The Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University, which collects and analyzes data on student engagement, reported that 18 percent of undergraduate and graduate students voted in the 2014 elections, a percentage that did not factor out students who are not U.S. citizens. The institute released a report this month that included recommendations on how colleges can boost student voting and political education.
“We view the current political climate as an unusual opening — and mandate — to improve campus conditions for student political learning, discourse, inclusion, agency, and participation,” a letter in the report states.
Students are diverse and enter institutions of higher education with a strong set of ideas, said Nancy Thomas, director of the institute.
“They’re not empty vessels into which we pour knowledge — they have a lot of ideas already,” she said. “They’re excited, they’re charged up, they’re ready to talk about these issues, and they’re ready to turn out the vote. I just can’t predict the volume, I can’t predict the voting rate, at all.”
TurboVote, the system Howard uses, works with companies, nonprofits and colleges, according to a spokesman for Democracy Works, the nonpartisan organization that runs the app. George Washington University also will be working with the app this year, said Amy Cohen, who heads up a task force on voter engagement at that school.
“We’re a national university, and so we draw students from all around the country,” she said. “It makes it a lot easier for us, not only to keep track of how students can manage those individual rules and laws, but also help them actually participate.”
