Taking the important first step

Jan. 26—During National Voter Registration Month, universities across the state participated in the Tennessee College Voter Registration Competition, and Lebanon's Cumberland University won the private university category and came in third overall.

Cumberland Student Government Association President Clarissa Gadsey and the organization's advisor, Libby O'Guin, first learned about the competition when they were invited to a luncheon at the secretary of state's office last summer.

"We had never won the award before, so I was like, 'I would love to, but the chances (of winning), I'm not sure,' " Gadsey said. "September rolls around. We got to organizing and got to working together. We held a booth out in front of Memorial (Hall). We went to our freshman-level classes that we have, probably about 15 of them, and just talked to people who had freshly turned 18, and talked to them about the importance of voting."

A snowball effect of registration on campus ensued.

Then, later on in the fall semester, the SGA received an email that informed them that they'd won.

Winning schools were chosen based on the number of new students registered and their social-media presence during the competition.

"It was an incredibly rewarding experience," Gadsey said. "I work as an intern for the Tennessee State Legislature, and it's very interesting to see how things take place as people vote, and they vote in the representatives that they believe will support them the best. People don't believe that state elections like the midterms in November are all that important, but they really are. It's really interesting to see how it works in person."

Every time that O'Guin left her office during the voter registration drive on campus, SGA students were hard at work.

"They were everywhere that week," O'Guin said. "They were awesome. We always hold a voter registration drive. SGA has done it for a while. They've just never done it as gung ho.

"It (voting) is a very, very important civic duty, and I want the students to understand that."

Over the course of the secretary of state's 2022 Tennessee College Voter Registration Competition, more than 1,000 students registered to vote during National Voter Registration Month in September.

"I believe that people registering to vote and actually going to exercise that right to vote is one of the core foundations of our form of government in how people get their say in what's done at the local, state and federal level," Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett said. "The very first step in all that is getting registered. We want people to take that step."

The lowest rates of voter registration are among individuals between the ages of 18-25. With many of that demographic being found on college campuses, partnerships like the voter-registration-drive competition help increase the amount of registered voters across 37 universities in Tennessee.

"Getting more and more people to vote shapes how our communities work," Hargett said. "The bottom line is we're going to have elections whether people participate or not. We're all better off when more people are heard so that we can have a society that reflects the values of all of us."