Student Voting at Michigan Technological University
Given that our society operates as a democracy, it is of utmost importance for every member to vote. It is each citizens’ civic duty after all. Based on that principle, I would expect to see numbers supporting the claim that more people vote than those who do not. After looking into the voting rates published by the NSLVE, I was shocked to see that more people are not voting than those who do. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement(NSLVE) is an organization that collects data on each college campus regarding its voting participation. Here on my college campus, the rate of students who vote is significantly less than the national average for all institutions. Based on data from 2016, the average voting rate among all institutions was 50.4%; on the campus of Michigan Technological University, around 34.3% are voting. Even more shocking was that the registration rate was 62.3%, meaning that only half of the people who register to vote end up going through with the process