About 500 students registered to vote last week during the Student Association’s final voter registration drive before Starkville’s May 3 primary elections, SA President Adam Telle said.
“Of course, we’ve been registering students to vote for the past four years, so you’re talking about numbers in the thousands,” he said.
Simon Bailey, SA director of governmental affairs, said he felt great about the students’ responses to the drives.
“You’d be amazed by the positive response you get,” Bailey said. “It’s not like you’re selling something, so when you go to the door and try to make a case for registering, students are pretty receptive.”
He said the SA had no numerical goals during last week’s registration drive but considered it a last push for registration before the primaries.
Bailey said the focus was on the fraternity and sorority houses that lie in the city limits and the students who live in town.
“We coordinated with a number of campus organizations in what we loosely termed ‘The Alliance for a Better Starkville,'” he said.
The SA and the other organizations visited door-to-door at apartment complexes throughout Starkville and attended fraternity and sorority chapter meetings to promote voter registration, Bailey said.
“Far too often we look at the campus and the town as two separate entities when in fact they’re inextricably linked,” he said.
Co-director of voter registration T.J. Harvey said the SA set up tables where students could register.
“I feel really good about it and really think the students are becoming concerned about voting in Starkville,” Harvey said.
Bailey said the SA is doing everything in its power to make sure the students who registered during the SA drives are actually registered with the city. Last semester, many students who thought they had registered to vote in the presidential elections could not vote on Election Day.
“A lot of errors were on the city’s end,” Bailey said.
The last day to register to vote for the May 3 primary elections was April 1.