Move Fall Break so students can vote

In the best of all possible worlds, colleges and universities would give students a break in the middle of the fall semester so that students could have the option of voting at home.

We can easily imagine the benefits of such an "election break." First, students would not be compelled to choose between voting by absentee ballot and registering outside their home state. For voters like me, neither of these is a particularly attractive alternative. Because I feel that I retain a vested interest in Maryland's state and local politics, I am not prepared to reregister to vote in New Jersey. I am resigned to voting in my home state by absentee ballot, but I am not at all pleased about missing my chance to show up in person at a polling precinct on Election Day.

Voting in person is one of democracy's few true rituals. The voting booth presents an opportunity to emotionally connect with the beauty and reality of the democratic process in a way that the absentee ballot just cannot replicate. I suspect that those of us who vote by postal ballot this year will feel just a little bit left out on Nov. 2.

Perhaps all that is just the idle romanticism of a first-time voter. Fine. But there are also more pragmatic reasons for universities to make time for students to vote at home. We have every reason to anticipate that if schools instituted breaks specifically dedicated to facilitating personal participation in the election, voter turnout among college students would noticeably increase. Nothing could send a clearer message to students that they are expected to vote, and nothing could make voting simpler and more convenient than an academic hiatus set aside for that purpose.

P-Votes has done an impressive job registering students to vote in New Jersey, but they have helped relatively few voters get absentee ballots in their home states. Obtaining an absentee ballot requires foresight and a not insubstantial investment of time and energy. I am not trying to suggest that typical college students are not up to the challenge, but I am suggesting that more people will vote if the paperwork for an absentee ballot is not a prerequisite. I know a number of perfectly conscientious classmates who have been meaning to file for an absentee ballot for weeks now, but just haven't gotten around to it. That's a recipe for lower than optimal absentee-voter turnout among college students. The easiest remedy, in a perfect world, would be to institute breaks that coincide with the election.

But of course, it's not a perfect world. Universities cannot simply disrupt their curricula once every four years to allow people to travel home to complete one task, especially when there is a perfectly viable way to complete that task by mail. Giving a reasonably generous allowance for travel time, the "election break" would have to be four days at the very least. And what kind of university offers that sort of break in the middle of the term?

Well, Princeton does. Our already existing fall break is timed to end just two days before Election Day. We miss the opportunity to vote in person, at home, on Election Day, by a mere 48 hours.

But there's an alternative. Imagine that this year's break ran from Thursday, Oct. 28 through Wednesday, Nov. 3 (instead of from Saturday, Oct. 23 through Sunday, Oct. 31). Fall Break would then include Election Day, enabling students to vote in person, wherever they choose to vote.

Would this throw off the entire fall semester schedule? Not at all. Since the fall term always begins on a Thursday, that would give us seven full weeks before break. Since we miss a Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving, we would have exactly five full weeks after the break. No further modifications would be necessary.

The Thursday through Wednesday "election break" is not a flawless proposal. It would cut the length of break from nine to seven days and divide the fall term asymmetrically. But these shouldn't be deal breakers, and anyway, there would really be no need to implement the new break schedule until Fall 2008. Four years should be more than enough time to iron out the details. Jeremy Golubcow-Teglasi is a religion major from Potomac Md. He can be reached at golubcow@princeton.edu.