County saw 10,000 youth votes

Almost a year after forming a student voting drive, Student Body President Matt Calabria now is receiving tangible results of the initiative for the first time.

And he’s pleased with what he is seeing.

The Orange County Board of Elections is reporting that 10,090 Orange County voters between 18 and 24 years of age participated in November’s election.

About 14,000 voters currently are registered in that demographic, said Carolyn Thomas, director of the elections board.

Calabria said he believes that VoteCarolina, student government’s new voting initiative, was partly responsible for the large turnout.

“I’m really pleased with the way things have gone,” Calabria said. “A significant part of voter turnout for college students was VoteCarolina.”

The success of VoteCarolina is based in learning from the successes and failures of past voter drives organized, Calabria said.

“I think what we did this year was build on the efforts of previous administrations,” he said.

Calabria said he and other student leaders used the previous initiatives to determine how to run a large-scale voting drive.

Many of the students involved in VoteCarolina, including Calabria, learned first hand about voter drives when they worked on an initiative led by former Student Body President Matt Tepper.

During the fall of 2003, Tepper headed a voter drive that registered about 2,300 new voters in Orange County, the biggest student voter registration drive in UNC history.

But the student voice failed to materialize in that November’s municipal election, as only 329 voters ages 18 to 22 turned out to vote.

VoteCarolina Chairman Jeremy Spivey, who served on the group’s executive board during November’s elections, said the organization worked to rectify the previous campaign’s shortcomings when organizing VoteCarolina.

Tepper’s drive offered incentives to students who registered but did not place adequate emphasis on voter turnout, Spivey said.

“If you incentivize one half, you’re not going to get the results you want,” he said.

Last year’s process involved about a dozen student organizations in the campuswide drive to register student voters.

The involvement of student organizations in the drive was encouraged by a grant from the Tennessee-based Bentwood Foundation, which offered 75 cents to groups for each voter registered in Orange County.

VoteCarolina made a concerted effort to increase voter turnout by providing transportation to polling sites and advertising the option of early voting.

“So many people voted in early voting, and that’s something I considered a great success,” Spivey said.

VoteCarolina officials now will turn their attention to the upcoming town elections in which students account for almost one-third of the electorate.

“Students can have a much, much larger impact than in national elections,” Spivey said.

Student government officials also will discuss amending the Student Code to include a clause about VoteCarolina.

“VoteCarolina is not a one- or two-year voter drive,” Spivey said. “It’s something that will stay around here, (and) I hope we can produce similar numbers in the future.”

Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.