The ASA held their annual vote kickoff event Tuesday night in the Modern Languages building to promote student voter registration for the upcoming elections and Proposition 204.
The event focused on the importance of registering to vote, as well as encouraging students to get fellow students to register.
This year, the event has a particular focus on promoting Proposition 204, which aims to make a temporary one-cent per dollar increase in the sales tax, which was passed in 2010 and is set to expire in 2013, permanent.
According to Dan Sullivan, the communications director of ASA, the proposition would allocate $300 million directly to universities in Arizona. Half of that money would go to fund financial aid.
The event was led by Arizona Students’ Association interns and members. The event opened with an introduction by the ASA campus organizer for the event, Tess Korbesmeyer. A video was then shown giving a brief history of voting and voting rights in the United States.
After the video, the interns broke students up into several groups and asked them how ASA could better engage students and get students to register to vote.
Sullivan stressed the importance of student voter registration, and said that ASA is trying to make this year’s campaign the most successful yet.
“We’re doing so much voter registration so elected officials will listen to the issues that matter to students and take action on them,” he said.
According to Korbesmeyer, the association has registered 3,300 students to vote in Arizona so far, with 1,450 at the UA.
However, ASA interns said they still want to increase student voter registration significantly. Even though a record number of students voted in the 2008 election, the percentage of eligible student voters who voted was still under 50 percent.
Jaime Aguirre, a freshman studying pre-pharmacy and nutritional science, was surprised by how informative the event was.
“I wasn’t really expecting it to be like this,” she said. “I thought it was going to be informative, come vote, stuff like that. I actually took back a lot more information than I thought I would, and it wasn’t boring.”
All of the ASA interns are new volunteers with ASA this year. Will Palmer, an ASA intern and family studies junior, was particularly enthusiastic about being involved.
“I’ve been in college for two or three years now, and I wanted to do something other than party,” he said. “You know, you get to that age, where you’re just going through the motions, and I wanted to do something worthwhile.”
