Election Day has come and gone, and it’s time to assemble a retrospective. The Voter Empowerment & Political Awareness Coalition, or VEPAC, recruited volunteers to bring students to the polls, and the turnout was greater than expected.
VEPAC Specialist and representative Maddie Pierce, was pleasantly surprised by the number of volunteers garnered in time for November 8th. Fifteen people, consisting of faculty and students alike, volunteered to drive or walk students to the polls to vote.
“I expected ten [volunteers] at most,” Pierce said. The greater-than-expected turnout was unanticipated, but welcome.
From 6am to 4pm on Election Day, Pierce and the fifteen volunteers led students to the polls to exercise their right to vote, and they serviced about 50 to 100 students within those hours.
Over the course of those hours, the line at the polling stations proved to be a challenge, which caused the shuttles taking students from campus to run much slower than desired. Pierce attributes the lines to the reduced amount of polling stations in Berea, numbered only two.
A surprising instance they mentioned was a group of students walking to a polling station from campus and being back 20 minutes before a shuttle returned after they had left at about the same time.
“I’m learning a lot about the realities of getting people to the polls.
Many students, according to Pierce, didn’t vote in person, instead voting using mail-in ballots. This is most likely because of a common perception that students must register in wherever they’re from outside of Berea. This is not the case.
Students at the College are able to register in Berea, so there would be no need to juggle the envelopes upon envelopes that come with the mail-in ballots. Pierce noted that sometimes students receive their mail-in ballots and forget about them, resulting in them being unable to vote come Election Day.
Plenty of students that received mail-in ballots, however, completed them and sent them off. To those students, keep doing what you do, and thank you for exercising your voting rights.
Pierce spoke of plans to expand VEPAC, getting more involved in students getting registered in Berea or elsewhere, and providing more assistance for students to vote in the evening before polls close.
Pierce noted previous instances in which the College gave students time to vote on Election Day, and they intend on speaking with the recent President-elect, Dr. Cheryl Nixon, about doing so again when her tenure begins.
VEPAC’s mission is to bring awareness to students’ own voting power and giving them control of their voice so they may participate in the democracy of the United States, and they’re only one tide in the ocean of young voters that’s making waves all across the country.
According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE, wrote in a publication that 27% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 voted in the 2022 midterm election. The weight of this turnout, seconded only by the 31% turnout rate in the 2018 midterm election, did not go unnoticed.
This demographic of voters made up 12% of all votes in this midterm election, which only falls one percent behind the 13% of voted made up by this demographic in 2014 and 2018. As more Election Days pass, that amount is expected to climb, and that climb begins with us.
“I’m learning a lot about the realities of getting people to the polls,” Pierce said, and this extends to the Coalition itself. As VEPAC learns, grows, and brings voter’s awareness to more and more students, voter turnout among them will only grow with it, and they will not go unheard.