The Student Government Association at the Modesto Maidique Campus is working on putting together events at FIU to register students to vote during the fall semester.
FIU is the fourth largest university with approximately 56,000 students. The Student Government Council at MMC is looking to register as many voters as possible during the fall semester before Election Day.
“There is a lot of skepticism about our generation, that we are definitely not the generation that cares about politics,” said SGC-MMC President Alian Collazo. “I think [this] is a misconception.”
Collazo believes that students care about politics, but that we have grown to become apathetic to traditional politics because of the environment students grew up with.
“I want students to get registered because I want us to really shut all those people up,” said Collazo. “Essentially, if we get registered to vote, and we vote, more millennials will have a voice in leadership and decision making in this country.”
Initially, SGC-MMC wanted to put together a series of events leading up to a main event where students from the FIU community would all vote together and were looking to secure an area to host it. However, since this year FIU is not an early polling station, they are focusing on three events with the main objective to get students registered.
These three events, called “Roar to the Poll”, will take place on Aug. 31, Sept. 12, and Sept. 27. The first event will take place on FIU’s kissing bridge, and the others will be hosted on either the lawns of the Graham Center or the pit.
SGC-MMC will have outside organizations registering students as well as some FIU organizations helping out with registration.
According to Collazo, it will be a series tailored toward voter appreciation, what it means to vote, and why it’s important. It will also focus on civic engagement, and encourage students to vote in this year’s elections.
“I have always believed that it is really our duty as citizens to go out and vote, to go out and express [our] opinions, and to be able to really make a difference through this right that we have,” said Collazo. “It is a privilege and a lot of us take it for granted.”
Collazo plans on leading an SGC-MMC effort to bring awareness to these events by going to different SLS classes, talking to students, engaging them to be informed. The association will also be working on finalizing the overall details and providing those details to students at the University.
Although nothing has been finalized, SGC-MMC is planning on different options to determine how they can encourage the students that register to go out and vote.
“[What] We are looking at is maybe an alternative to the city of sweetwater, extending their trolley to come to campus during the early voting days,” said Collazo. “[Maybe] the first two days or the last two days of the early voting, or get a bus to [take] our students to the poll.”
Even though there are many initiatives to create change starting on FIU’s campus, the objective has not changed, which is to get as many students registered as possible by the time registration closes on Oct. 5.
“A lot of us Americans, we do not necessarily go out and exercise our right to vote as much as others around the world because we think that we are born into it, and we forget that it is something that not everyone has,” said Collazo. “Different universities across the country do different events, to get the same outcome. We started thinking how can we kind of mirror those things or give it a shot here at FIU from the student government perspective.”
The idea came about when Collazo was in Washington D.C. while at the White House. His experience there influenced him to share the importance of civic engagement with the FIU community.
“We were all talking about a lot of things that come with the responsibilities [when] being student leaders,” said Collazo. “We got into the conversation of importance of voting. In our country we have this great opportunity to exercise our civic right to vote. That touched me a lot because I was born in a country [where to] this day people do not have that right to elect their leaders outright.”
FIU Student Media will update when more information becomes available.
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