The Flashes Vote Festival brought student organizations together Monday afternoon to help students get registered to vote for the upcoming Nov. 7 election.
Jessica Starkey, Undergraduate Student Government Director of Governmental Affairs, organized the event.
Starkey planned this event for Oct. 10, the day before the voter registration deadline, to ensure students are registered in time for the November election.
“The younger people get civically engaged, and I just think it’s really important that students know that even if they’re young, their voices deserve to be heard,” she said. “Even though this isn’t a presidential election in November, they should still make sure to vote and still make sure that whatever opinion they have is heard.”
This is the second year that USG has hosted the Flashes Vote Festival, but it was a significantly larger event than last year. Starkey said that 12-13 organizations ended up participating in the festival this year.
She said that many of the organizations she reached out to were planning on doing their own small things for voter registration, but they ended up all coming together to organize a more significant event.
Dimaya Mayfield, director of student relations for Black United Students (BUS) and president of the Ohio Student Association, had a big part in the planning this event.
“My biggest concern was reaching young black voters, because the black voter population is already not that great,” she said. “It’s even lower for black students.”
Mayfield worked to get more organizations representing people of color to attend the festival.
Some of these groups were the Male Empowerment Network, an organization for men of color, and SALSA, representing Spanish and Latino students.
Mayfield said that one of the reasons she finds that students are not registering to vote is that they feel as though they are just one person and that their vote does not matter. She disagrees with this sentiment.
“If you say that your vote doesn’t matter,” she said, “and 200 other people are saying their vote doesn’t matter, and these important issues are being won by really really small margins, your vote could’ve changed the way that that turned out,” she said. “A lot of people are deterred from voting because they don’t know just how much power their vote has.”
State issues One and Two will be on the Ohio ballot this year.
Issue one deals with protecting abortion and reproductive rights within the state, and issue two deals with the legalization of marijuana in Ohio.
“I would say those are pretty important to look into and go vote for,” Mayfield said about the issues on the November ballot.
Registering students to vote this year will also encourage them to participate in more elections in the future.
“I think a lot of the issues are really important to many students, but I think that all elections are super important and that students should be engaged in them,” Starkey said.
Addison Foreman is a reporter. Contact her at [email protected].
