This election season, Kent State Today will feature a series of stories about voting on campus, sharing information about how and where to vote, first-time student voters, important event dates and deadlines.
Kent State University is fully engaged in helping students – many of whom are first-time voters – register to vote, while providing non-partisan information on the candidates and issues.
Undergraduate Student Government’s Kent State Votes initiative is the central hub for coordinating and sharing information about the many election-related activities and events happening around campus. Student organizations, university divisions and departments and other university faculty and staff are engaged in the charge to get students registered and informed.
In addition to helping students learn how to register, campus leaders are also working to encourage some students, who may be skeptical, that their votes matter as a means toward positive change.
Helping to Get Out the Vote
Kent State Today spoke with three Golden Flashes who, in different roles, are working to inform, register and motivate student voters on campus by remembering our university's history and their role in society as engaged citizens.
Kara Robinson
The Kent State University Library has been a hub for Portage County voters for more than 20 years, as the location is designated as a Government Documents Depository serving the citizens of this congressional district. Kara Robinson, associate dean for Equity, Faculty Affairs and Talent Management, began working with the local Board of Elections a few years ago in receiving registration forms, checking signed forms for completeness and accuracy and promoting education about registering to vote.
“When the Kent State Votes coalition came in, it was very easy to slide into their work because we’re all working on the same thing,” Robinson said. “We all have different takes on it, we all have different responsibilities for it. The fact that it’s a student-led group partnered with Community Engaged Learning is just really wonderful. It gives all of us who are doing this kind of work in silos an opportunity to talk together that’s really useful.”
Robinson is a primary point of contact for the local Board of Elections and is considered an agent of the Board. “So, we can do things like take voter registration forms at 9 p.m., just like the Board office does on the last day of voter registration,” she said. “So, we’ll be here until 8:55 p.m. on Oct. 7 to receive those forms.”
Robinson’s Responsibilities
The University Library hosts tabling events throughout election season, including those presented by the League of Women Voters along with library-sponsored tabling dates. “We always table on the last day of voter registration,” Robinson said.
She also helps coordinate training of Residence Hall Resident Advisors, along with Craig Berger, associate director, community engaged learning in Kent State’s University College, who is the co-chair for Kent State Votes, and Barb Hipsman-Springer, Associate Professor Emerita.
The Library Services Desk is a designated intake spot for completed voter registration forms on campus. Robinson said, “We do that so I can check them all. I check every one, make sure they’re completely filled out, make sure they’re legible and have the information that they need before I take them to the Board of Elections.” She also personally highlights, in yellow highlighter, the important areas of the forms that must be filled out before they are distributed on campus.
‘Our Students Need to Make Sure Their Voices are Heard’
Both as an agent for the Board of Elections and as part of the Kent State community, Robinson recognizes Kent State’s role in 18-year-olds gaining the right to vote in 1971. “There’s that piece of our university history – the voting age is 18 in part because of Kent State University,” she said. “And it feels good to carry on that tradition to make sure our students today are as informed, and as involved, as those students were in 1970 – who didn’t have that opportunity to vote. But our students do.”
“I always feel like our students need to make sure their voices are heard. The easiest, most straightforward way to do that is by voting.,” said Robinson.
Barb Hipsman-Springer
Before she began teaching at Kent State in 1987, Associate Professor Emerita Barb Hipsman-Springer worked as a reporter, a lobbyist and also taught at Bradley University. She began working with the League of Women Voters in Kent in the late ‘80s and worked to amplify the League’s presence on campus through the ‘90s to the present. She served as the League’s president for several years. It was during her time as president that Hipsman realized that the needs on campus were growing beyond the League’s ability to support them.
As she headed toward retirement from teaching, she ramped up her involvement with the League and began looking for people on campus to help with their efforts. “I retired in 2013 and it’s been my passion ever since,” said Hipsman-Springer. “But I don’t do this alone.”
Hipsman-Springer said that there is a group of about a dozen men and women who she counts on to help when the League is holding voter registration events or setting up programs to train students. These volunteers come from colleges and departments all around campus.
A few years ago, people from Kent State’s Community Engaged Learning and the Kent State Women’s Center, along with Undergraduate Student Government came together to begin the Kent State Votes initiative. Hipsman-Springer said that she is happy with the way Kent State Votes has grown and evolved as a group offering non-partisan advice and training. This path is in alignment with the League of Women Voters’ mission “to educate voters in a non-partisan setting and to encourage voting in as many diverse communities as possible,” she said.
Moving Forward, Looking Forward
Hipsman-Springer said that the League of Women Voters “plans to stay involved on campus with our members helping wherever we feel our knowledge base is needed. The students may be passing through our university as they mature and graduate, but we hope Kent State Votes and the League have given them a taste of the political power citizens should exert in a democracy.”
“My line is,” she said. “Go get registered by Oct. 7, read up on the issues and then VOTE on Nov. 5. No one sees who you vote for. Just make sure YOU count in our shared democracy.”
The League’s College Tour
The current president of Kent's League of Women Voters and Development Director for Ohio's League Of Women Voters, Sherry Rose, is a Kent State alumna. Hipsman-Springer said that Rose was instrumental in developing the League’s statewide “Your Voice, Your Vote, Your Power” tour of colleges this year. In a red and blue Airstream trailer, driven by Kent State alumnus Trevor Martin, and stocked with games, snacks, voter information and voter registration forms, League representatives will visit more than 20 campuses this fall, including Kent State, on Oct. 7, the final day of voter registration.
Cassandra Pegg-Kirby
‘If we don’t vote, we can be sure it won’t count.’
Referencing the quote by novelist, poet, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any,” Cassandra Pegg-Kirby, director of the Kent State University Women’s Center stressed how important it is to participate in the political process through voting.
“There is a lot of rhetoric about how our votes don’t matter and one vote doesn’t make a difference. We cannot believe that,” Pegg Kirby said. “And we need to participate in voting for what we value and exercise that right and responsibility. If we don’t vote, we can be sure it won’t count.”
Part of the mission of the Women’s Center, Pegg-Kirby said, is to think about what we can do to remove barriers from our students realizing their full potential and to be a voice that encourages them. “I think we ALL have a responsibility to our students and voting – every single one of us,” she said.
Voting as a Means for Change
Pegg-Kirby sees activism for and against the issues and legislation we feel passionately about as important, but voting as equally important in the people we elect to represent us and the issues that are addressed and legislation that is put forward.
“That’s why,” she said, I encourage students to participate. Make the the effort to get registered and to vote. When barriers are put in front of you, it’s time to dig in, clarifying what the challenges are and then find a way to make progress in spite of them – whether that is access to voting through registration challenges or difficulty getting to the polls.”
Changes in the Voter Mindset
Pegg-Kirby sees differences between the attitudes of students during her college years and the students at Kent State today. “I think the overturning of Roe v. Wade has galvanized many young women to vote in a way that was not the case when I was in college,” she said. While she recognized the challenges of that time and the work that needed to be done, Pegg-Kirby said that she was not as aware of the legislative and voting process as she sees students are now.
“I think seeing, and hearing from, more women in positions of power and influence within our legislative bodies – locally, statewide, nationally and globally – has young women thinking differently about their roles and opportunities to be in places and participate in the political arena, to be part of co-creating the world and future they would like to see for themselves,” she said.
Important Dates and Deadlines
Oct. 7-11 is National Voter Education Week, and Monday, Oct. 7 is the deadline for voter registration in Ohio.
Oct. 8-29 are the dates when voters can vote by mail. Oct. 29 is the last day to request absentee ballots, mailed ballots must be postmarked by Monday, Nov. 4.
Nov. 5 is Election Day. Polls will be open from 6:30 a.m–7:30 p.m. Outstanding absentee ballots must be received at the Board of Elections by 7:30 p.m.
For complete information about how to register, where to register and when and where to vote, along with important resources and links and all Kent State voting activities and events, visit Kent State Votes.