The BadgersVote Student Coalition led a Zoom the Vote event Monday Sept. 21 on Zoom to inform students how to register to vote in Wisconsin and to answer questions about registration and voting laws.
With Election Day fast approaching on Nov. 3 and National Voter Registration Day on Tuesday Sept. 22, the student coalition partnered with the League of Women Voters of Dane County, Start Up and the Bradley Learning Community, hoping to increase civic engagement among UW-Madison students. Monday’s Zoom discussion was the first installment in the four-week series of one-hour long Zoom conversations geared towards increasing voter turnout.
Among the topics discussed on the call, speakers noted that of the 43,000 UW-Madison students, about 37,000 are eligible to vote — but many of them do not.
“At the University of Wisconsin-Madison we have a 53 percent voter turnout on campus, which means we have a lot of work to do in terms of turning out other students,” said Tamia Fowlkes, a UW-Madison student and BadgersVote representative, in the call. “So, In terms of events like this and reaching out to your friends we want to make sure that we’re all playing a role in educating each other about voting.”
According to the Wisconsin Election Commission Voter Turnout Statistics, in the 2016 election, just 67.34 percent of eligible voters in Wisconsin participated in the general election.
Wisconsin, at the forefront of current election debate and discourse, will play an integral role in the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election. In 2016, Republican Donald Trump won the state, unexpectedly, by a narrow margin of 0.77 percent over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Now, with Trump running for re-election, Wisconsin has been at the center of both his and Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s presidential campaigns.
Trump visited central Wisconsin last week, while Biden made a stop in Manitowoc Monday afternoon. Both candidates visited Kenosha in early September after violence broke out there at protests against police brutality.
Besides federal elections, there are many important local and state elections in Madison and across the state to make note of. Visit myvote.wi.gov to see who is running in local, state and federal elections.
Next week, on Monday, Sept. 28 at 6 p.m., the presentation will go over information about absentee ballots, early voting and in-person voting.
Sophia Vento is a former editor-in-chief of The Daily Cardinal. She previously served as the college news editor. She has covered breaking, campus, city, state and sports, and written in-depth stories about health, culture and education. She previously interned with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Any newsroom would be lucky to have Sophia on staff. Follow her on Twitter at @sophiasvento.
