Casting a pivotal ballot

The stakes of the upcoming American election could not be higher. The circumstances could not be stranger. “It’s crazy, everything that’s happening in the world,” says Vivian Mikhail, a program coordinator in Loyola University Chicago's Office of Civic Engagement. By casting a ballot during a pandemic, students are participating in something monumental. “They’ll be in the history books,” Mikhail says. 

For the better part of a year, Mikhail and a small team of colleagues that form Loyola University Public Engagement—LUPE, for short—have been trying diligently to register and engage those historic Loyolans. Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, the working group had centralized disparate voting drives across campus; that fall, nearly 800 students either registered to vote, requested an absentee ballot, or updated their home address at Welcome Week events (like U-Pass pickup) or on National Voter Registration Day. 

LUPE’s game plan for 2020 necessarily shifted after the novel coronavirus swamped the United States this spring and summer. Traditional tabling or physical canvassing, for example, were no longer feasible. And LUPE representatives intuited that questions would start to emerge, especially from first-time voters, about ballot security and the mail-in ballot process. “I can’t imagine being a college student during my first election,” Mikhail says, “and it takes place during a pandemic where I’m afraid for my health.” 

Instead, LUPE is turning its attention to voter education, as a means to minimize confusion and boost turnout. LUPE’s website (LUC.edu/vote) bundles together voter registration guides, training materials, and a host of FAQs related to the election. Mikhail is offering one-on-one voter advising sessions on Zoom for those in need of additional clarification.

Demetri L. Morgan, an assistant professor in the School of Education, developed a Faculty Champions Program, a toolkit for instructors interested in promoting democratic student engagement in the classroom. LUPE is also partnering with existing groups on campus—Athletics, First-Year Experience—that have initiated their own internal registration efforts. The more comfortable potential voters feel, the more votes cast. 

Sebastian Ellefson (MPP ’15) feels the same way. As a cofounder of BallotReady, he’s spent the past six years lowering information barriers for voters across the country. His project incubated during the 2015 Chicago municipal election, when Ellefson was still a master’s student at Loyola; he and two cofounders put together a simple paper voter guide, offering context about every person and initiative on the ballot that year, top to bottom, in all 50 of Chicago’s wards. Ellefson and his team then entered and won the Social New Venture Challenge at the University of Chicago, a startup pitch competition that provided seed money for expansion. 

They’ve done so rapidly, clearing technological and logistical hurdles and hiring “an army of researchers” to build out their platform. This fall, anyone in the United States can plug their address into BallotReady’s search box and check their registration, request a ballot, research the particulars of their ballot (biographies, endorsements, issue stances), and then identify their precise polling location. Ellefson is BallotReady’s “real in-the-weeds person,” parsing the most byzantine electoral scenarios. He’ll hound county officials for details at the most minute level so the information can be represented accurately. 

All voters need information and clarity, now more than ever. BallotReady’s traffic has never been higher. “If you’re an organized individual and you’ve got a little time on your hands, you can sit down and look up all the candidate websites and do the research yourself. But it takes time and organization,” he says. “Even if you’re moderately busy, it’s an easy thing to push off.” 

Ramblers of all stripes are hungry for the data that Ellefson and BallotReady collects. That includes Claire Krutchen, a senior political science major who serves as one of two LUPE student representatives and as president of Inside Government, a nonpartisan campus organization that connects students and alumni devoted to public service. If Krutchen has learned anything over the past few months, it’s that this election season is a pitched one. “Almost everybody that I know is very focused on the election,” she says. “Even students who aren’t political are paying attention.” 

In this most unusual of years, Krutchen volunteered to serve as an election judge on November 3—wherever she’s assigned, she’ll set up and take down polling stations, transmit ballots to the Chicago Board of Elections, and answer any lingering questions. She plans to cast her own ballot early, at the Chicago Public Library branch in Edgewater, because she knows her voice and her vote matter. 

“Every couple of years, there are instances in which literally one vote does affect a single election,” Ellefson adds. “It always happens somewhere.”