Voter Registration Update

Yesterday was day one of my students' on-campus voter registration project. We got a whopping sixty-two unregistered voters to sign up to vote in the November election. We gave new voters voting guides from the Board of Elections and encouraged them to take literature from our table about both presidential candidates so they could begin educating themselves about the issues. One day down, two to go. We're hoping to register 150 new voters. Heard several of the new voters say they didn't know you had to register to vote. A few said they thought you were automatically signed up upon turning 18. Lots of folks aren't familiar with the voting process. Some know little about Bush and Kerry. Even more are unfamiliar with state and local-level elections taking place in November. My class is conducting interviews, surveys about the issues and the candidates, and ethnographic observations of the voter registration table. So far all we have are anecdotes. I can't wait to learn of their findings next week when they begin writing their field reports.