Saturday, January 26, 2008

We're #1- UCSB registers the most voters in the NATION

UCSB has preserved their spot as the university with the highest percentage of registered voters in the nation!

According to the Daily Nexus, "With 5,031 students officially registered to vote in the upcoming California primaries, UCSB has claimed the highest proportion of registered voters of any university in the nation, accounting for nearly 39 percent of all registered University of California voters. According to a UC Student Association press release, the UC Students Vote! project, which mobilizes students across the state to do peer-to-peer voter registration, recruited a total of 12,918 voters system wide. UCSB was trailed by UC Los Angeles with 1,787 graduate and undergraduate students registered out of about 36,000 total students."

Now, take into consideration that UCSB has a student population of 20,000, compared to UCLA's 36,000. 25% of our student body is registered to vote, compared to just 3% of UCLA's student body. WHOA.

So we have the highest % of registered voters than any other campus in the nation, now let's make sure we get the highest % for voter turnout on election day!

GOTV February 5th!!!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Question.

Did the Daily Nexus actually get data on how many registered voters there are among the students at every college in the NATION?

I've read the Daily Nexus article, and it appears to be a "no". In fact, they don't have that data on any colleges, not even UCSB.

There is no way to find out how many registered voters there are at every college in the nation, because that is not a public record. The counties won't release those names, nor should they.

If you were to find the percentage of registered voters at:
-Grove City College
-Hillsdale College
-New School For Social Research
-Oberlin College
-Hampshire College
-The King's College in New York City
-and countless other colleges

I guarantee you, at least one if not all of them would be over 25%, because those are highly politicized campuses.

Unless you can substantiate the assertion in your entry, I think you should edit it so that the word "nation" is replaced, each time it appears, with

"UC System, by way of current 'UC Students Vote' voter drive"

because that is all that can be reasonably concluded.

Keep in mind that the campus voter drive numbers won't reflect people who registered to vote separately from the current voter drive. That is very significant, because I'm sure UC-Berkeley has a lot of registered voters who did not participate in a voter drive this time. Remember, when you are registered to vote and you do vote, and you don't change your address, then you're automatically registered for the next election, without having to participate in a voter drive. I'm sure UC-Berkeley has a lot of registered voters who are in this category, who voted in 2006, because UC-Berkeley is a much more politically active campus than UCSB. My guess is that more than 25% of UC-Berkeley students are registered to vote, but that most of them did it separately from the UC Students Vote project.

Keep in mind, it is possible to register to vote online in many counties. Also, if you take a registration form from the campus voter drive, and then fill it out later and mail it yourself, I don't think it will count toward the UC Campus Vote total.

So please edit your entry. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

I would definitely urge you to rethink the statement "UC-Berkeley is a much more politically active campus than UCSB."

If you believe this you might want to take a closer look at what's been going on at UCSB the past couple of years...

Anonymous said...

I've been to UC-Berkeley and to your campus in the past 2 years. There is no comparison.

There is no perfect way to measure numerically how politically active a campus is. One way would be to look at attendance for politically controversial speakers who visit the campus. If you do this, UC-Berkeley will win big. When David Horowitz spoke at UCSB, he had a medium sized audience in Girvetz 1004. It was mostly non-students from the area. The few students who went were mostly people who already sympathized with David Horowitz. When Horowitz tries to speak at UC-Berkeley, the audience is enormous and he needs armed guards to get past the protesters and rioters. There was not a single protester when he spoke at UCSB. This is just one example, but if you look at almost any sort of political event or visit, you'll tend to see much higher attendance and arousal at Berkeley. I'll stand by my statement you egg sucking college kid.