The Huntington News October 30, 2020
The independent student newspaper of the Northeastern community
@HuntNewsNU
NU
AIMS TO INCREASE ELECTION TURNOUT AMONG STUDENTS By Annie Probert News Staff A non-partisan coalition of students, staff and faculty is looking to increase voter turnout and engagement among Northeastern students during one of the most eventful election years in recent history. Dubbed Northeastern Votes, the initiative is co-led by the university’s Office of City and Community Engagement and the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy. Hilary Sullivan, coalition co-chair of Northeastern Votes and director of Community Service and Civic Engagement at the university, said that while the term “Northeastern Votes” has been used by student organizations in the past, this coalition is in its inaugural year and strives to coordinate efforts to get Northeastern students civically engaged. “In the nine years I’ve been at Northeastern, I’ve noticed that there is not really a strategic effort to
get students to vote,” Sullivan said. “Most of the efforts come up every four years when there is a national election, but this coalition is really passionate about wanting to bring together students, staff and faculty to increase Northeastern’s voting efforts in every election.” Samridh Chaturvedi, chair of the Elections Committee in the Student Government Association, or SGA, and a second-year computer engineering and computer science major, said a member of Sullivan’s team reached out to SGA to assist her office in reviving the term Northeastern Votes into a coalition for the 2020 election in late June of this year. Coordinating the effort during the pandemic forced those involved to modify traditional voter engagement methods, he said. “Planning around [COVID-19] made it super difficult because we couldn’t rely on the past work that people had done like in-person voting registration,” Chaturvedi said. “Everything had to be scrapped.” While the campaign has
tabled outdoors in recent weeks, Northeastern Votes has also been encouraging students via social media to cast their ballots. Roughly 25 student organizations have signed on in support of the coalition’s efforts, Chaturvedi said, and there are differing levels of support a member organization can offer, from simply forwarding Northeastern Votes information on social media to working closely with the coalition. The Northeastern University College Democrats are heavily involved in the alliance, Chaturvedi said, and the Northeastern University College Republicans recently signed on in support. “We wanted to make this a really social media-focused campaign because we thought that would work best for the [COVID-19] era,” Chaturvedi said. “Supporting organizations mostly just shout us out to spread the word. We want to get some clubs to do social media takeovers as well on issues that are important to them.” The coalition has also worked
to engage student organizations in fields of study whose members historically vote in lower numbers, like engineering and mathematics, Chaturvedi said. According to the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, or NSLVE, Northeastern’s voting patterns revealed engineering students to vote at a rate of 53.5 percent and mathematics students 50.6 percent. Despite college students nationally voting at a rate of 48.3% in the 2016 election, lower than the 61.4% national average, Chaturvedi said she finds Northeastern to be a “pretty politically engaged campus. The 2016 NSLVE report eligible Northeastern students voted at a rate of 56.9 percent in 2016. A main goal of Northeastern Votes is to boost voter turnout among NU students by 10 percentage points to at least 67 percent, Sullivan said. To achieve this goal, the coalition has coordinated various voter registration and education programs for students. During a series of voter registration drives held by
Northeastern Votes the week of Sept. 21, the coalition registered 150 students to vote, said Hannah Nivar, SGA’s executive director of communications and a second-year political science and international affairs major. With many different voter education events occurring both on Northeastern’s campus and in the surrounding Boston area, Sullivan said another aim of Northeastern Votes is to simplify how students can find broader civic engagement initiatives and programming. “Voter education is huge for college students, and there are so many different events about issues or candidates that happen on campus,” Sullivan said. “One of our goals is to collect all of those one-off events and advertise them together.” With mail-in ballots growing in popularity due to the pandemic, Chaturvedi said Northeastern Votes is also trying to inform students on voting procedures they may not be familiar with. The university COALITION, on Page 3
Mass. votes on Ranked Choice Voting By Julie Henry News Correspondant On Nov. 3, Massachusetts voters will choose whether to implement ranked choice voting or uphold the status quo of winner-take-all. The majority of elections in the United States use the “winner-takeall” system, where you choose your candidate for each race, grab your “I voted sticker” and head out. But with ranked choice voting, commonly referred to as RCV, voters ranked
candidates as their first choice, second choice, third choice and so on. Voters can choose to rank only some of the candidates or even just one. The candidate who wins the majority of the votes (in this case, “majority” means greater than 50 percent) wins the election. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated, and their votes are redistributed. This process repeats until someone wins a majority of the votes.
While RCV may sound outlandish, it is used throughout the country. Cambridge elects its city council and school committee using a multi-winner variant of RCV. Maine uses RCV for local, statewide and federal elections. Currently, cities in California, Maryland, Minnesota and New Mexico use RCV for local elections. Last year, New York City voted to implement RCV for its city council, citywide and borough president primaries in 2021. This November, ranked choice voting is on the ballot
in Alaska, and Mainers will vote for the president using RCV — the first time RCV will be used for a presidential race in the United States. Most voters have never used, let alone heard of, RCV. Some opponents of ranked choice voting worry that an alteration to our voting system would be too confusing for voters, but studies show that is not the case. “Once people actually vote in their first ranked choice election, their positive evaluations of the system
increase,” said Victoria Shineman, University of Pittsburgh political science assistant professor. “People liked the system even more after they’d used it.” In her research on mobilizing voters in San Francisco, she found that people who have voted in at least one election that uses RCV found that ranked choice voting was easy to understand and was better than the plurality system. Additionally, voters are more confident not only in their RCV, on Page 8
In Opinion: Election 2020 T H E C A S E FO R B IDE N Northeastern for Biden President Jackson Hurley argues that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s 40-plus years of public service will bode well for our country. From increasing the minimum wage, to investing in green energy and expanding Obamacare, Biden will best serve the American people. He deserves to be our next president Read more on Page 10
THE C A SE F O R TRU MP Columnist Madison Boudreau Popovic argues that President Donald J. Trump has what it takes to win reelection over former Vice President Joseph R. Biden. She contends that Trump oversaw impressive nationwide economic growth, helped communities of color through his policy reforms and restructured the college loan repayment plan to decrease higher education costs. Read more on Page 10