Student voters beat 2012 turnout on Election Day

Student voter turnout for the 2016 presidential elections is up 7 percent campus wide since the 2012 elections, with the overwhelming majority of those votes going to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Student wards themselves counted nearly 30,000 undergraduate votes, and there was a 2-to-5 percent increase of voters in dorms.

Ward 55, which includes the Spring Street area of campus, saw 3,177 voters, an increase from 2012 when 2,694 votes were tabulated. Clinton received 68 percent of the vote.

And in Ward 56, which includes the Southeast dorms, 2,093 voters went to the polls in 2016. In 2012, only 1,982 people cast ballots.

“The general mentality of voter turnout about millennials is they either don't care, or they don't vote. This is a misconception,” Scott Resnick, a former campus representative in Madison Common Council, said.

Resnick, a UW-Madison alum, is currently collecting data about city and campus voting trends.

“The millennial voters are taken for granted, they are very active” Resnick said.

The surge of new voters brought along a shift in preceding voting patterns. According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Dane County has voted over 70 percent for Democratic candidates in presidential elections since 2004.

Madison has nearly 80 percent of Democratic voters, however once on campus the number of left-wing voters drops by nearly a quarter.

“You see more conservative first-time voters in Sellery and Witte rather than what you would see on Spring Street,” Resnick said.

Despite this increase, the margin between Democratic and Republican votes did not dramatically shift.

It is not clear what contributed to the increase of student voters.

“It wasn't just one factor,” Resnick concluded. However, campus encouragement and events to register student voters did not play a small role. The university issued over 6,000 voting IDs to out-of-state students to make it easier for them to vote under the state’s new voter ID law.

155,880 voters cast ballots across all of Madison in 2016, representing 77 percent of registered voters.