Promotion for voting in the upcoming election has spread all over the UW-Milwaukee campus since early voting opened in October. Posters, pamphlets and billboards are plastered all over the Union with the urgent message to register to vote. The main targets are young voters who are turning 18 and learning about how the election system works. Political organizations on campus are rushing to get as many students registered as they can before November 6.
The Student Association mobilized before early voting started in Milwaukee, and are responsible for the larger banners and posters about voting in the Union. Alyssa Molinski, SA president, said that the organization has been passing out flyers and posting social media notices since the start of October. The Student Association also collaborates with the group “Leaders Igniting Transformation”, or LIT, to register students to vote.
According to Molinski, the Student Association’s goal is to educate students on how to register to vote, which can be hard for students from outside of the city and those who aren’t aware of the Voter ID law in Wisconsin. She said her dream is to update the current yellow IDs issued to each student so that they work as suitable voting IDs, with preferred names and pronouns, an expiration date and a signature.
“Young people and their voting turnout isn’t great,” Molisnki said. “We’re the hardest group to get to vote, which is very confusing to me, especially on college campuses where it’s really in your face.”
Chris Kresser is a political science major and the chair of the College Democrats at UWM. The College Democrats have done their share of marketing for this election, appearing in the Union at tables or canvassing in neighborhoods near campus. For Kresser, the hardest part of getting students to vote is timing.
“It’s not that [students] don’t care,” Kresser said. “They have more obligations to worry about in their own life. That’s just the reality, life is busy.”
Admittedly it can feel like politics is out of control of the average person. Especially when you’re a student. You’re in college, you’re broke all the time, you’re hungry, you’re trying to study. The last thing you’re worrying about is what’s going on in Congress.
Chris Kresser
Organizers have to find ways to connect politics and voting with students’ lives. They have a few different tools for this job, and one of the tools is to find issues that students are interested in.
John Graber, a UW-Madison graduate, is the chair of the Milwaukee County chapter for Wisconsin Young Republicans. Graber said that voting becomes more important in students’ lives with age and life experience, when issues start becoming more relevant to them.
“Say you become a homeowner,” Graber said. “Property taxes all of a sudden becomes a topic you really think about. If you have your own kids and you choose to send them to a private school or a public school, that’s when the school choice and public education funding becomes an issue.”
Chris Kresser said that motivates him is the heated, ever-polarizing political climate; after Trump’s win in 2016, it gave Democrats more incentive to push harder for this election.
“In a way, pessimism creates enthusiasm,” Kresser said. “For instance, when the Trump Administration took office, one of the things they tried to do was repeal the healthcare that the Obama administration put in place. Seeing them try to go through with that and not succeed, as sad as it was to see that happening, that was kind of a motivator.”
Neil Albrecht is the Executive Director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission. He’s been an election administrator since 2005 and has overseen 3 presidential elections. According to Albrecht, the job of the election administrators is to supply the vehicle to vote: ballot boxes, polling stations and other tools for actually voting. Though they don’t do a lot of marketing, the Election Commission works with community organizations to inform regular people about voting.
Albrecht said that student voting is important for two reasons; capturing young people early on makes voting a lifelong habit for them, and that voting for students is difficult in the first place. Information is usually unavailable but the Election Commission tries to get as much information to students as possible, which includes feeding student groups information on voting.
No matter what political alignment they have, groups on campus and in the city do feel that it’s important to get young people to vote, whether it’s because of the impact of their vote or how it affects their lives or habits later on. These organization members maintain their enthusiasm and hopefulness for this next election.
“[Voting] doesn’t come that often,” Alyssa Molinski said. “We don’t have elections all the time, so no matter how frustrated are, I think you should just keep trying.”