Rutgers enrolls 18,000 new student voters
Archived article from Nov 3, 2003
By Richard Gorman
A highly successful student-led voter registration campaign has enrolled some 18,000 new student voters during the past month.
The campaign started last spring when a group of concerned students, including Lauren LaRusso, then president of the Douglass College Government Association and now studying at the Graduate School of Education, met with President Richard L. McCormick to discuss the university’s ongoing response to budget cuts proposed by the state. The group had already staged a successful student rally in Trenton to protest the proposed cuts. Now it was time to plan the next step.
When McCormick suggested a strong voter turnout to demonstrate support for education, a sad truth emerged: A large proportion of Rutgers students don’t vote. “Rutgers is so large, and we don’t have polling places on campus, except for Livingston and Busch,” LaRusso said. “What’s more, there was really no one to help the students get to an off-campus polling location. It’s like telling them to go to uncharted waters.”
Spurred on by the Higher Education Act of 1998, which calls for colleges and universities to make a “good-faith effort” to distribute voter registration forms to all degree- or certificate-seeking students on campus, and with strong support from the administration, LaRusso volunteered to spend the summer investigating ways to increase the university’s role in registering students, educating them about the issues and getting them out to vote.
“I did my research over the summer. I checked out what was going on at other colleges and universities, and other organizations, centers and institutes. It seemed like there was a whole movement going on and it matched what I wanted to do here.”
Working with Maya Enista, the East Coast coordinator for Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan, national organization that seeks to motivate young people to vote, and Jason Redd, the student representative on the university’s board of governors, LaRusso helped turn a loose association of student groups into a coalition that included the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group. Serving as the project coordinator, LaRusso drafted a proposal outlining specific methods of increasing voter registration, improving voter education and getting out the vote.
By Oct. 6, the voter-registration deadline, the coalition had accomplished 16 major points in its proposal. Some of these involved:
> sending an e-mail message from McCormick to all students urging them to register to vote
> producing a Web-based voter guide to the political process, listing the names of candidates, the election date, times and the location of polling places
> creating an online location to register to vote
>distributing and collecting registration forms in residence halls
>creating a database that logs student registration in each district
>and providing university transportation to polling places.
The coalition’s efforts were immensely successful. It registered 18,000 new voters, including 15,000 Rutgers students. McCormick praised the effort in his Address to the University Community in September, saying “we can all learn something from Lauren: that problems also bring possibilities … and that a commitment to fundamental ideals tempered by knowledge and understanding can lead to real-world change.”
“What I hope we’re doing is institutionalizing the process so that when I leave, it will continue,” LaRusso said. “I see civic education becoming a part of the mission of the university. With this president, I see it going far.”
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