The Boulder chapter of the Colorado Public Interest Research Group has been working to activate the student vote at CU.
CoPIRG
has a new program called the New Voters Project with main two goals.
The first goal of the project is to enable the student vote. This
project wants to get more student voters.
With more student
voters, this project attempts to make the student voice audible. Since
politicians usually gear their campaigns toward older citizens,
increasing the student voice will get politicians to talk about issues
relevant to the 18-to-24-year-old demographic.
"We allow the
opportunity for students to get involved in politics," said Dan Omasta,
a sophomore political science major and chairman of the CU CoPIRG
chapter.
The first part of this project is to ask candidates,
"What's your plan," and to talk to candidates about issues relative to
students.
The second part of the plan registers new student
voters. CoPIRG has formed a coalition with UCSU and New Era Colorado
aimed at getting new students to register to vote for national
government.
Though CoPIRG did not help with the recent UCSU
election, the coalition was effective at getting new student voters for
upcoming non-student elections. About 3,500 new voters register during
this campaign. In Fall of 2006, 2,574 were registered.
Hadley Brown, a Tri-executive of UCSU, was involved with this program and gave credit to CoPIRG for their efforts.
"The increase can be attributed to CoPIRG's efforts to engage students," Brown said.
Cory Nadler, the campus organizer, just transferred from the CU-Denver campus to Boulder and already has noticed a difference.
"Boulder is younger," Nadler said, "we work on activating more traditional college students".
