September 30, 2004
Campus groups ‘make noise’ to get out the vote
While the University is gearing up for a new academic year, Nancy Amidei, a senior lecturer in the social work department, is gearing up for the election in November. No, she’s not running for political office, but she wants to make sure that everyone on campus — students, faculty and staff — are registered and planning to vote.
“Four years ago, I was in a terrible state,” she said, “because on election day, I was saying to people, ‘Have you voted yet?’ And I was shocked by the number of people on campus who said things like ‘Is that today? Is it too late to register?’ I couldn’t stand the thought that we had people on campus who somehow didn’t have it on their radar screen to vote.”
That’s why this fall Amidei can be found at all kinds of gatherings wearing a sign around her neck and carrying voter registration and change of address forms. And it turns out she isn’t the only one on campus who’s concerned. When she put out a call, 15 or 20 people showed up at a meeting to discuss the matter.
In short order they’d formed a loose coalition called UW VOTE! — a group whose sole purpose is to promote voting among the various groups on campus. Many of its members also represent other groups that are promoting the same thing.
Take Carl See, for example, vice president of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS). He made a grid of all the orientations for the various graduate and professional schools and recruited volunteers to go to them laden with those voter registration and change of address forms. With the department’s approval, the volunteers make a short presentation about voter registration.
“As the vice president for GPSS, my primary role is to advocate for graduate students on and off campus,” See said. “My off-campus work includes lobbying for UW graduate students in Olympia during the legislative session. To strengthen our lobbying position, it is to our advantage to register as many students as possible.”
Down in the health sciences, Ian Maki, program operations manager for SPARX (a program devoted to medical care for underserved populations) is doing his bit attending orientations and passing out forms there.
Meanwhile, undergraduate student Jamil Suleman has formed the Student Vote Coalition, which he hopes will “facilitate the largest student mobilization effort ever. “We’re going to representatives of student government, the Greek system, the residence halls, Young Democrats, College Republicans, and others,” he said.
Volunteers from those groups were handing out voter registration materials at Dawg Daze this week and also planned to hand out issue-based, non-partisan pamphlets there and at other events.
And so it goes. People who show up at UW VOTE! meetings are the same people planning voting-related events across campus. Meg Estep of New Student Programs, for instance, is not only coordinating Dawg Daze, where voter registration forms were handed out, she’s also planning an event called Democracy Fest, which will be held Oct. 26 on the HUB lawn. Co-sponsored by the Seattle Times NEXT page and Seattle Rock the Vote, it will be a nonpartisan event featuring issue-focused speakers and a collection of tables for groups to share information.
Naturally UW VOTE! has a Web site, http://www.washington.edu/about/vote/ with information such as how to register and how to figure out which legislative district you live in. It also has useful links, such as to online voter registration forms. Librarian Angela Lee created the site with student help.
For Amidei, getting out the vote is a passion. “I had immigrant parents, and while I was in the Peace Corps I spent time in countries where people didn’t have the right to vote, where they stood in long lines the very first time they were given the right to vote, where they fought and bled and died for the right to vote,” she said. “And I simply cannot understand not voting when you have that power.”
For those who haven’t yet registered, time is critical. Mail-in registrations must be postmarked by Oct. 2. Then for the next 15 days you can still register, but you must go in person to your county elections office to do it.
“The UW VOTE! effort is really just saying elections are very important,” Amidei said. “This is an important election year. We can’t let anybody slip through because we haven’t made enough noise about it. This is about making noise.”
