DELAWARE, Ohio — Confusion about voter registration and the voting process, along with COVID-19, prompted Ohio Wesleyan University to switch gears and to make things easier for its students.
What You Need To Know
- Social media is being used to engage and educate students about voter registration and voting
- Going digital doubled student engagement and helped to clear up confusion
- Ohio Wesleyan plans to use the digital platforms for future election cycles
Mallorie Watts, 20, is on a mission—one that aims to help as many of her peers as possible at Ohio Wesleyan University to vote and to vote big.
That’s because every time elections roll around, many students struggle with the voting process and getting the right documents, like utility bills, to do so.
“Most students would wait till the last minute,” Watts said. “And we get a lot of people saying, I need this.”
So, she addressed the problem by developing a way for students to automatically get their utility bill with their address to take with them on Election Day. Plus, she made sure they got sample ballots along with a voting guide walking them step by step through the registration process.
“If they’ve already registered, how to check the registration to see if they need to update it so if they moved into a different dorm than they were in last year, or if they haven’t registered to vote, that, you know, this is the address that you registered to vote with,” Watts said.
Sending out the bills alleviated stress.
But it’s what Watts did after that, which really caught student’s attention. Taking to Instagram, she created “My Plan to Vote.”
The idea was to use social media as a way to encourage voting in the 2020 election.
“You would say if you’ve registered to vote,” Watts said. “When you were going to vote so if you were going to vote absentee, in person, early voting, or in person on Election Day, and then if you’ve requested drugs and tea ballot, and then you would tag three friends at the bottom.”
Assistant Professor of Politics and Government Franchesca Nestor helped Watts pull it altogether. Since COVID-19 sidelined in-person voter initiatives, Franchesca developed YouTube videos to engage students as well with quizzes on the registration and voting process.
“We’ve used a platform called Ed Puzzle to have a training process and that’s worked out actually very well,” Nestor said. “We’ve had more students participate in the training than ever before actually.”
While she knows that the switch to digital has been successful, she said she misses the benefit of the in person interaction.
For Watts, she just hopes the months of hard work pays off at the polls.
Until then, they both continue sharing information with students as Nov. 3 comes near.
For the future, Franchesca said they’ll be using the digital initiatives to continue helping students in the voting process to continue to make things easier.
