IU students did not get the vote out

But more than 3,000 showed up to see Bernie speak

Today I came by the polls to interview Hoosiers about the stereotypes they face as young, millennial eligible voters. Meanwhile, the rest of campus was living up to one of those major stereotypes.

Students could cast their ballots for the local elections and the Indiana primary at polling stations on campus at Union Street Center (sort of conveniently located) and Memorial Stadium (terribly located, especially with the north-facing entrance).

At about 3:45 PM the poll workers at Union Street said they had 473 votes cast so far. When I found the polling station in the labyrinthine football stadium — ok, confession time, I’d never been there before — a few moments before the polls closed, they had a total of about 380.

There are over 42,000 students (graduate and undergraduate) at the Indiana University Bloomington campus.

If there were 473 votes cast at Union Street at about 3:45 PM, that’s 473 votes over 675 minutes, or about 0.7 votes per minute or 42 votes per hour. So, we can estimate Union Street gained about 90 votes over the remaining two hours and 15 minutes. If you hate math, just take my word for it when I say that means Union Street would have finished the day with around 563 votes cast.

This means we had a total of approximately 943 voters on campus for possibly one of the most important primary elections of our lifetime. And that’s assuming virtually none of the voters were IU employees living in the area and eligible to vote on campus.

Sure, some students likely voted early or absentee for other areas.

Yes, some students aren’t US citizens and can’t vote.

Uh huh, some students could have gone to other polling stations away from campus, too.

But a turnout on campus of less than 1,000 is downright unacceptable.

I realize it is finals week and your grades feel more immediately important than the person who will be running our nation for four whole years. I realize that getting registered or having your absentee ballot figured out in advance and on time may seem like a chore. I realize that the football stadium seriously is a seriously weird choice for a polling station and that the signage guiding interested voters could have been better.

But we’re the generation stereotyped as the first to complain and the last to do something about it. The youth vote was critical in the 2008 election, including at the primary level.

You may roll your eyes at those obnoxious “I voted” posts on Instagram and Facebook, but they frankly appear to deserve their special snowflake status as the Hoosier elite of the day. They are after all, part of the 3% of students who voted on campus today.

You have seven months to get your shit together, IU.

More
IU