An additional 478 Princetonians are now registered to vote around the country following a registration drive by P-Votes that ended earlier this week. The student group also helped about 100 students change their addresses, in hope of avoiding the election-day confusion that has plagued the campus in years past.
University students who are registered to vote locally based on their campus addresses must update this information each year, assuming that they change rooms from one year to the next. Some moves, even within the same building, can involve switching from Princeton Township to Princeton Borough.
“When you are registered in New Jersey and change [rooms], you have to fill out a change of address form, which is the same form as the voter registration form,” P-Votes president Elise Schlissel ’09 explained. “If you don’t do that, they’re really strict at the polls.”
Students who had not filled out change of address forms for previous elections were given provisional ballots, which are only counted in New Jersey for races in which their inclusion could alter the outcome.
Kalila Minor ’11, who registered in New Jersey for the presidential primaries, noted that she observed confusion among fellow students about local registration.
“People really didn’t know about [registration issues] and were showing up [at polling stations] and having problems just because they moved dorms,” Minor said. “People weren’t familiar with the problem, and it wasn’t publicized as well as it could have been.”
Eric Meng ’09, who voted at the Jadwin Hall polling station in the primaries, said he experienced a number of difficulties in that election.
“I don’t think they had enough ballots, so you had to wait, and there was no definite time they said you would get the ballots,” he said. “I waited for an hour, went home and got dinner and came back. There was a lot of confusion there.”
Meng said that he is going to vote by absentee ballot this year, explaining that “it’s going to be easier that way.”
Schlissel said she thinks there will be less confusion and a larger turnout in the upcoming election.
“The energy that we’ve seen so far for the debates and registering suggests we will have a good turnout,” she said. “The efforts will pay off.”
Overall, 7,171 people are registered to vote in the Borough and 12,022 people are registered in the Township, Mercer County Superintendent of Elections Bettye Monroe said, adding that the county has 215,080 total registered voters.
P-Votes members are not the only students working to bring about an orderly election day.
Members of the College Republicans and the College Democrats volunteer as “poll challengers” to ensure that voting goes smoothly, College Democrats member and poll challenger Cindy Hong ’09 said. Hong is also a columnist for The Daily Princetonian.
“I’ve done poll watching twice to make sure nothing weird happens. In that position I’ve seen a few incidents,” Hong said. “It’s not that people get turned away when their addresses aren’t updated. If you have moved addresses on campus, and you’d be changing your voting district, they make you fill out a provisional ballot.”
Provisional ballots slow down the voting process and discourage voters, she said.
“It happens to a few out of every 10 people. In February, in the primaries, they ran out of provisional ballots,” Hong said, explaining that “during the period they ran out of ballots and before the new ones arrived, there might [have been] some people who didn’t vote.”
The Princeton Election Board has changed one polling location since the primaries. Students registered in the Township — those residing in Bloomberg and Scully halls and parts of South Baker Hall, 1981 Hall and Forbes College — will vote at Carl Icahn Laboratory instead of Jadwin.
Residents of most other dorms will continue voting at the Trinity Church Parish House at 33 Mercer St. Residents of Prospect Avenue will vote at the Princeton Engine Company No. 1 Firehouse on Chestnut Street, and residents of the section of Forbes College located in the Borough will vote at the Suzanne Patterson Center, located behind Borough Hall.
Visit the 'Prince elections calendar for more news, opinion, and multimedia coverage of the 2008 election season.
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