UVU has a goal to get 2,000 students to vote in this year’s presidential election Nov. 8 and win the Utah Campus Cup.
The Utah Campus Cup is a statewide voting challenge sponsored by the Utah Lieutenant Governor’s Office. Universities and colleges in Utah compete for the cup every two years by getting the most students to vote from each campus.
School officials provide students with a specific URL when registering to vote. Last year, Utah State University won with 900 voters. UVU plans to surpass that goal by Nov. 1, the last day to register to vote.
UVU began a campus initiative, UVote, to get students involved and interested in voting.
Tyler Gehrig, UVote campaign manager, says he wants to see civic engagement on campus and for people to be interested on national and local levels.
Earlier this month, UVUSA organized a pizza and politics focusing on the importance of voting during Political Action Week Oct. 11-14.
Luke Peterson, director of the Office of New Urban Mechanics and keynote speaker of the event, urged students to vote in greater numbers:
“People about 18 to 26 years old say collectively, ‘my vote will not matter.’ And then as a group they don’t vote, which is true. And their vote really doesn’t matter, because collectively they failed to vote. They have very little influence on the election,” said Peterson. “Whereas senior citizens, they vote. They vote in huge numbers. There are a tremendous amount of issues in this country which are decided based on whether or not we think senior citizens will like them because they vote and you don’t.”
Peterson recommended that students get involved in local politics because it will have a bigger influence in their community than just voting for a candidate.
“We hope that students find why their voice matters, especially their generation with the upcoming election. We’ve been trying to get students to vote since September,” said Andre Jones, chief justice at UVU. “The main part of political action week is to show students why they need to vote and why they need to be civically engaged.”
