FAMU, FSU students ready for upcoming midterm elections with first-time voters 'excited'
As many freshmen prepare to vote — some for the first time — Florida A&M University will also experience a first: serving as a polling place for a midterm.
Students at both FAMU and Florida State are looking forward to exercising their right of casting votes, including FAMU freshman Sebastien Lacroix, whose midterm election vote will be a first.
Lacroix, a Jacksonville native, said the 2016 presidential election between former President Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the highlight that made him realize the importance of voting.
“After that election, I told myself that when I vote on the local and national levels, I would vote for someone who knows the people they are addressing,” said Lacroix, 18.
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Polling sites on college campuses in Tallahassee include FAMU’s site at the Student Union and FSU’s site in the Student Services Building this year, a change from its previous location at the Tucker Civic Center since 2018.
In the last midterm election, FSU had a 50.2% voter turnout as 3,023 out of 6,023 eligible individuals voted, according to records from Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley.
Although the last day to register to vote was Tuesday, Earley expects to see more registrations come in from the college student demographic. He says that Florida law allows voters to update their address after the deadline, as long as they are already registered in the first place.
"We often see a surge of younger voters updating their voter registration addresses into Leon County once early voting has started," Earley said in an email to the Democrat.
FSU student engagement in 2020 shows that 90.4% of voter-eligible students were registered to vote, and 84.8% of the ones who were registered went on to vote in the election, according to the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement.
The National Study is a service to colleges and universities interested in learning about the voting habits of their students while gathering data for research on college student voting trends.
Out of all eligible students at FSU, 48.8% of them voted in the 2020 election compared to 39.1% of eligible students who voted across all universities that year.
“It’s important to get young people to vote because we’re generations that will be running things in the future,” FSU sophomore and political science major Adrianna Hernandez-Fernandez, 19, said while at Landis Green Monday. Clipboard in hand, she encouraged students passing by to register to vote in Leon County if they had not done so already.
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“I don’t think that we have the right to complain about the government not working the right way if we’re not expressing our opinions about it when we have the chance through voting,” Hernandez-Fernandez added.
FAMU freshman and psychology major Aaron Jones from Atlanta also expressed his thoughts on the power of voting to work toward addressing concerns.
“I know that for Black people, we’re not always at the table where important decisions are being made, so I feel like the number one thing should be making sure we vote for people who understand where we come from and what we’re going through,” said Jones, 18. “We complain a lot, but voting is a way of doing something about it.”
Similar to Hernandez-Fernandez, second-year FSU student Kemely Napoles is also majoring in political science and accompanied her as they both spoke with students to ask them if they were registered. The midterm election will be Napoles's first time voting.
“I started getting involved in politics between 2016 and 2020, and I was always frustrated about not being able to vote, so I would just get on my parents to vote,” said Napoles, 19. “But now, this is my first chance to actually vote myself, so I’m pretty excited.”
Early voting begins Monday Oct. 24, where the FAMU Student Union and FSU Student Services poll sites will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Contact Tarah Jean at tjean@tallahassee.com or follow her on twitter @tarahjean_.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Elections 2022: FSU, FAMU students 'excited' to cast votes
