UBalt Student Leaders Encourage Voter Engagement
October 31, 2022
Contact: Office of Advancement and External Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
Planning to vote? Here's how you can participate:
UBalt is hosting an Election Day Bash on Tuesday, Nov. 8 from 3-6 p.m. in the Student Center's second floor open space. Students are welcome to enjoy food, games and prizes. Let us know if you plan to attend.
If you need help identifying your polling place, are looking to learn more about the candidates and questions on your ballot, or want to know your options for voting, visit UBalt's voting resource guide.
Britney Green may never forget the first time she got to cast her ballot in an election. The emotional weight of this moment she had been waiting for hit her the moment she got in line and made her way to the ballot box.
Raised in a multi-cultural home in Dallas, the M.P.A. student (pictured above, left) says she was taught from a young age to respect culture, differences and community. Those lessons set the foundation for what would become a life of community and civic engagement.
"For me, it's the ability to impact change," she says. "Growing up in the south, I was witness to a lot of things that, unfortunately, because certain people didn't vote, things stayed the status quo. Being able to exercise that right to vote, No. 1, and then secondly, actually showing up to do so, is really important to me."
Green and Kristin Robinson (pictured above, right) a University of Baltimore School of Law student, are the 2022 Andrew Goodman Foundation Vote Everywhere Ambassadors at the University. They work with Anthony Butler, director of the Rosenberg Center for Student Engagement and Inclusion, in planning and hosting events to urge voter engagement across the campus community. This fall, they set up an information table for National Voter Registration Day—though most students they met had already registered—and on Nov. 8, they will host an Election Day Bash in the UBalt Student Center.
The Vote Everywhere Ambassadors are part of a national, non-partisan movement, driven by The Andrew Goodman Foundation. They have access to training, resources and a peer network to help them increase registered voters, break voting barriers, and, generally, encourage civic engagement among students in their college community. Butler considers it a unique task at UBalt where students are already very engaged and informed as voters.
"When we have events on campus, for example, it's never like, 'Why did you become a legislator?' It's like, 'So you voted this way on House Bill 214, can you tell us more about that?' Our students are just super informed and engaged."
UBalt has consistently been recognized for its voter engagement, including most recently, Washington Monthly's 2022 rankings included UBalt among America's Best Colleges for Student Voting.
The University earned a gold seal award from the All In Campus Democracy Challenge for the number of students who participated in the 2016 election. With its 69.7 percent voting rate, it was the only campus in the country to earn gold-level status that year.
Two years later, it earned a platinum seal for achieving a more than 50 percent voting rate in the 2018 midterm election. Its 58.5 percent voting rate—the percentage of eligible students who voted—put UBalt among the highest in the country for college campuses.
In the 2020 presidential election, UBalt again surpassed national standards with a 72.6 percent voting rate compared to 66 percent nationwide, according to data collected by the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement (NSLVE).
"When we first started getting the NSLVE reports, I got calls from national organizations wanting to interview and ask how we had such great engagement," Butler says, "and the first thing I said was it's not our programming that's doing it—certainly I hope it helps—but it's about who our students are."
UBalt students are actively engaged in their communities and informed about the democratic process. That was clear even to Robinson and Green during their tabling on National Voter Registration Day when many of the students they flagged down were already ready to vote and instead sought out discussions about some of the issues that could be affected by their vote.
For Robinson, who says she comes from a rural Virginia town where interests are homogenous and the voting impact feels minimal, it's important to be part of an engaged community where individual voices count.
"Voting there," she says of her hometown, "I always felt like it did nothing because it didn't move ideas along. It didn't move change. But here, everything changes at every election, every idea gets pushed forward because of how many people vote. And it's just really interesting to see how much of an impact it can have for people to vote."