P-Votes registers 311 voters

P-Votes, the University’s nonpartisan group dedicated to voter registration and education, has been active in the past few weeks, ensuring that students know their options for where to register to vote. The organization carries registration forms for every state so students can decide whether to register in Princeton or at their home addresses.

This year, 311 students have registered to vote directly through P-Votes, and many of those were first-time voters. While 169 chose to register in New Jersey, where the registration deadline was Oct. 12, 142 have registered in other states.

P-Votes does not weigh in on students’ decisions about where to register, P-Votes co-president Steve Lindsay ’12 said.

“We don’t take a side,” he explained. “It depends on the person. Do they know or care about their home or local politics? Where are they going to be on Election Day?”

Mauricio Lanio ’11, who is from Miami, said he will vote in the state more closely tied to his future.

“I assume I’ll move back to Florida at some point, so the politics of my hometown are more important to me,” said Lanio, who registered several years ago when getting his driver’s license.

But other students said they felt their votes would carry the most weight in New Jersey.

“I’ve always wanted to have two senators and my own congressperson,” said Sam Lazerwitz ’14 of Washington D.C, which is represented in Congress by one non-voting delegate. “Having a vote in New Jersey is somewhat more meaningful than having a vote in D.C.”

Ease of voting is important to many students, and P-Votes is certainly aware of this concern: Lindsay called convenience his organization’s “mantra.”

Olivia Garad ’13 said she is registered to vote in New Jersey but was home in Colorado for fall break on Election Day last year and did not vote.

“I’d like to be registered back home in Colorado,” she said. “I doubt I’ll vote this year because of the inconvenience.”

With Election Day again occurring during fall break in two weeks, P-Votes has emphasized mail-in voting for all voters — not just for people who will be far from their polling locations. In New Jersey, voters can request mail-in ballots for any reason.

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“We don’t want to risk it,” Lindsay said. “It’s a combination of risk aversion and due diligence.”

P-Votes has reached out to students at freshman sign-in and at the student activities fair. The group also maintained a table at Frist Campus Center for a week and distributed New Jersey voter registration and mail-in ballot request forms to all undergraduate mailboxes.

This year’s efforts at direct registration have been more successful than last year’s. In 2009, P-Votes directly registered 130 voters. In 2008, though, the organization filed 478 voter registration forms.

The organization is “pretty happy with [this year’s] number,” Lindsay said.

The nature of some of the organization’s efforts makes it difficult for the P-Votes to estimate the total impact of its work. While it is straightforward to count the number of registration forms collected at tabling events, for instance, it is impossible to quantify the impact of voter registration e-mails sent out by the organization.

The range of P-Votes’ efforts stems from the organization’s basic mission as described by Lindsay.

“We’re doing our best to ensure that our university has a politically, democratically and civically involved student body,” he said.