Nothing says success like excess

Are voter registration volunteers a little too abundant on campus? While the importance of voting should be obvious, significant effort is put in around election time to ensure that no student forgets to participate.

Every year, volunteers join forces and converge at Portland State with clipboards, matching shirts, pens and pamphlets, all with the goal of motivating students to register to vote.

Some students are frustrated by the sheer abundance of volunteers peppered across campus around registration time—even more annoyed by certain strategies employed by volunteers. Some are just tired of running into volunteer after volunteer on the same day for several days, even after they have registered to vote.

The strategies volunteers use to get students signed up range from very simple to a little more forward. It’s easy to find flyers or posters all around campus reminding students to register, and these posters are often changed out to reflect how many days are left until the deadline of registration, making it easy to remember and impossible to miss, even for the busiest students.

With registration over, the campaign now turns to educate voters on the political issues that they will be voting on in the near future. The main goal of the voter registration drive is to get students registered to vote so that there will be more voting power during the actual election.

Some strategies, however, are not as popular with students. It is not at all uncommon to see volunteers make announcements at the start or end of a class—which some students may find frustrating.

Andy Fullenwider, a senior studying micro-molecular biology at PSU, expressed distress at volunteers making announcements in classrooms.

“It’s one thing to see a guy on the street, but it’s another to see one in the classroom—that’s taking my time,” Fullenwider said.

While volunteers are good about trying not to cut into class time, the notion that they would use students’ time—which is paid for by tuition—to promote voting to help lower tuition is a little annoying. Students want to use that time just for class, and it is especially tiresome, after having navigated through several volunteers outside, to be faced with another in the classroom.

Fullenwider is also bothered by the fact that volunteers making announcements in classrooms often made no connection that registering could lead to lower tuition rates.

“People don’t understand it goes beyond the ballot,” Fullenwider said. “People don’t understand that this is our country, not the government’s.”

Many volunteers are students volunteering through ASPSU, while some are community members and others are volunteers working directly for the Oregon Student Association, a lobbying group focused on representing student issues—such as tuition—in legislation.

Erika Spaet, 23, is one such volunteer working for a local nonprofit, and was volunteering her time for the OSA.

“They think nobody cares,” Spaet said, also noting that part of the reason for the effort behind the registration drive was because there were thousands of students eligible to register that simply don’t.

PSU student Betty Chan, 22, volunteered her time to ASPSU. Chan has felt good about the efforts being put forward by volunteers.

“I think what we’re doing is effective,” Chan said, adding that she did not feel volunteers were scaring off potential registrants—and Chan may be correct.

Fullenwider also feels that while it may, in fact, be necessary to be more forward with students on the issue of registration, it is also exhausting running into multiple volunteers in one day.

“It’s okay to skip some [street] corners,” Fullenwider joked.

Ultimately, volunteers saturating PSU’s campus is not entirely unwelcome—many students are not bothered, or simply don’t care about the presence of so many volunteers, and understand that their intentions are good. However, registration drives should have their limits, and in the case of volunteers working toward student voting registration, remember that we’re on campus to attend classes, not to see a presentation on voting. ?