Emporia State University students are helping a 32-state effort to register 40,000 college voters this year.
After that, maybe they’ll do something difficult.
When it comes to something like this, after all, the Hornets are already veterans. Back in 2004, the university became part of the American Democracy Project, an effort to re-ignite public interest among college students and have them make a long-term impact on society. It caught fire quickly at ESU — the students circulated around 6,000 voter registration cards and saw a lot of them come back filled out and ready to turn in.
“I personally delivered something between 2,000 and 3,500,” said Rob Catlett, an ESU economics professor who has helped guide the project. “We registered huge numbers of people.”
But the really impressive part, he added, has been the effect on the students themselves. There have been foreign students learning how U.S. democracy works. Or disaffected students who began to care about the system again. Or even, in one case, a grandmother who voted for the first time and couldn’t believe how easy it had been.
“They described a transformation,” Catlett said, as he talked about the essays his students had turned in afterward. “They were overwhelmingly positive and some of the most moving writing I’ve read from students.”
The American Democracy Project was created by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. John Schwenn, who was then ESU’s vice-president for academic affairs, got wind of the project and thought it sounded interesting. So Catlett became one of three people sent to check it out, along with Public Affairs and Marketing Director Marjorie Werly and former ESU political science professor Clay Arnold.
They came back excited, and things soon got underway.
Once given the option, the students themselves would decide whether to participate and how. Some ended up speaking to classes on the importance of registering. Others took the voter drive into the dorms. Some even ended up inviting speakers to class, such as Attorney General Phill Kline or Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh — non-partisan speeches only, please.
After 2004 proved to be such a huge success, the next year would be a challenge. It was an off-year, with no state or national elections scheduled. So this time the students would go to work on public service projects — but always with an eye to the long term.
One case was the United Way. Several of the member agencies didn’t Internet sites, Catlett said. His economics students knew they could whip ones up easily enough, but also knew it would be outdated within a couple of years.
They worked instead with computer science students, getting them to take it on as a club project. Working together, they not only created the pages but designed them so they could easily be modified to meet future needs.
This time out, ESU’s participants in the project are getting scientific. The nationwide project, it seems, wants to know how best to reach college students and encourage them to vote. So different universities get to try different methods, reaching out to half the campus while leaving the other half alone as a control group. Later on, the students will check the rolls to see who responded and who didn’t.
ESU’s task is to try to register at least 150 students through e-mail. Actually, the university should have been a control group itself, but by the time Catlett got word, the students had already jumped in with both feet. So, with a little switching, Emporia State became a player when things started up last week.
Of course, it’s not exactly a typical player, Catlett said.
“We’ve already registered 100 students.”
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