UK Students Registered 302 Voters Today!

A coalition of student groups including UK KFTC, UK NAACP, and UK Catalyst led a massive voter registration drive today on campus.

Students set up in four locations throuout the University of Kentucky's campus and other students canvassed hallways of several classroom buildings and the Student Center. 

In all, they registered 302 people to vote, shattering previous voter registration records for a single day's work.

"It was great to see various student organizations on campus work so closely together to reach the maximum amount of students," said Sanjana Pampati, a key organizer of the event.  "While I was getting lunch, I actually heard someone passing by say excitedly, 'I just registered to vote!" which perhaps sums up our accomplishments for the day."

Many students we talked to didn't realize that they could register to vote using their campus address, so getting that information out was a big focus of the day. 

KFTC's own Jared Flanery also got an 0p-ed publishend in the Kentucky Kernel (UK's student newspaper) today encouraging students to register or update their voting address and bringing their attention to the voter registration drive.   In addition to pieces on campus radio stations WRFL and WUKY, plus a consistent tabling prescence, we think that we've been able to reach a significant percentage of the UK student population. 

Reflecting on the day,  UK KFTC member Brock Meade said "Voting is an important step along a path to active citizenship. Because it's such an easy step and so readily accessible, it is often left undone, which is a shame. But we got a lot of people set up to vote today, which is awesome."

More than a few students were also under the impression that they had registered to vote online recently, but it's not possible to register to vote online in Kentucky.  At best, it's possible to fill out a card online then  either print or receive the completed card in the mail, sign it, and mail it in.

It was good to be able to get through to students and correct some misinformation about this while there is still time, but a bit disturbing that so many student were under the impression that they had registered to vote online. 

You can see other pictures from the day on our flickr gallery here. 

The voter registration deadline is just 7 days away - on Tuesday Oct 9th. 

Many KFTC chapters have scheduled voter registration marathons or other registration events this weekend to get as many people ready to vote as possible in what time we have left.