Their headquarters are smaller than one might imagine for a group so visible across campus: inside the cramped room in Mahar Hall, there are a bunch of posters and boxes, an election trivia spinning wheel and the base for a large cotton candy machine.

A student walked into the room to grab some car keys belonging to Allison Rank, political science professor and Vote Oswego campaign manager. Moments like this, Rank said, of back-to-back meetings, messy rooms and strong trust between a professor and her students comprise the bulk of what works behind Vote Oswego.

“It’s a really different way of working with students than kind of a traditional, ‘Everybody come sit in this room and we’re going to talk about a book,’ kind of class,” Rank said.

Vote Oswego is a campus voter mobilization campaign run by Rank: part-course, part-club and part-internship. It is difficult to walk around campus in the fall and not see the name. Especially this semester, Vote Oswego has gained a reputation for its ubiquity across campus.

Samantha Kern, the aforementioned student, heads the group’s absentee ballot initiative. Kern and 18 other students, plus five paid interns, spent the fall semester at the headquarters, a more spacious classroom and tables across campus ensuring their peers get clear access to what they need to register and cast their ballot.

“When we’re outside everyone’s happy, smiling, trying to be as open as possible, but in that room it’s all grind,” Kern said.

They carry a lofty task.

“We’re just touching a lot of the same audience over and over when we’re coming on campus,” Kern said. “So it’s really hard to get new students involved who don’t know about Vote Oswego.”

That audience consists of on-campus residents, who are more likely to see Vote Oswego tabling at events. More specifically, they are theater and music majors.

But commuters and online students are the most difficult to reach, Kern said.

Students often find the forms difficult to complete. Some put the date on their registration form instead of their birthday, and vice versa. Some conflate the primary election for the general election.

For Kern, educating her peers and helping them navigate the voting process is what motivates her.

“Being able to teach someone something is really kind of fulfilling in a way after a lot of these tabling events,” Kern said.

There has also been a consistent issue of desk attendants at residence halls misplacing absentee ballots in mail boxes, instead of setting them aside and emailing students, a procedure Rank started in 2018.

Pat Woodward, associate director of residence life and housing, recently sent a memo to desk attendants reminding them of how to handle the ballots, calling it “imperative” for students to access their ballot.

When registering for their ballot, students also have to decide between registering for their campus address or their home address. Registering to vote then becomes a question of identity.

“The way we talk to students about it is like, you should decide which community is the one you want to have kind of your political say in,” Rank said. “Is it here in Oswego that you’re going to live the majority of the time these four years, or is it about your community back home that you still feel really connected to?

This election cycle, Rank observed more and more students registering to vote from their campus address rather than at home. To accommodate this number, she organized a shuttle service for Election Day to take student voters from the main campus to Laker Hall, the campus polling site.

“That’s a huge shift for us,” Rank said.

Rank started her work with Vote Oswego in 2015. Her experience at a different college, whose similar campaign consisted of two students in “Rock the Vote” t-shirts sitting at a table all day, inspired her to go further at Oswego.

This semester saw the “Get Out the Vote” film festival. Rank worked with screenwriting professor Juliet Giglio and cinema professor Jacob Dodd to have students from Dodd’s cinematography class produce short films urging students to vote.

Some filmmakers found it a distraction. Giglio called it “strategic.”

Rank and her team also planned a “Vote by Mail Party,” a project led by Kern, to help students mail out their absentee ballots. It is one of many parties and small festivities the group holds building up to Election Day. The group calls these few weeks of anticipation the “Ballot Blitz.”

For her efforts with Vote Oswego, Rank won the John Saltmarsh Award for Emerging Leaders in 2019.

The campaign collects data on student voter turnout for the National Study on Learning, Voting and Engagement (NSLVE) by Tufts University. NSLVE data from the past few elections show a small jump in student voters for the last presidential election, from 3,064 voters in the 2016 election to 4,173 in 2020.

Ironically enough, the most effective way to get students to vote, according to Rank, is to teach them that voting is not the most crucial step of engaging in politics. 

“We’ve really been trying to help students kind of conceptualize voting as like one piece of a bigger strategy that they might want to use for political change,” Rank said.

The mindset plays into Vote Oswego’s slogan, “Step up and speak out.” Voting, Rank says, is just one of those steps.

It is a step Kern knows well—this election is her first time voting.

“Some of us in our generation are just so sick of what we’ve been seeing the past couple of years,” Kern said. “We want to change what we’re seeing and elect someone who’s going to make that change.”

Image by Evan Youngs