Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, is Election Day, a time when citizens across the country will head to the polls to make their voices heard on a variety of issues and candidates, most notably the presidential election. Only 66% of eligible people voted in the 2020 presidential election, which was the highest voter turnout rate in any election since 1900. At Carleton College, however, the unrecorded voter turnout rate stood out high above the national average with 87% of eligible students voting in Minnesota or their home state.

The 2020 statistic sets a high bar for students preparing to vote in this year’s election. Helping to reach these expectations are programs such as CarlsVote, a non-partisan office of the Center for Community and Civic Engagement (CCCE). Founded several years ago, CarlsVote aims to encourage as many students as possible to head to the polls, whether in-person  in Minnesota or by mail in whichever state they reside. CarlsVote joined the CCCE several years ago, marking their transition from a student organization to an official part of the college. This status provides access to institutional funding and resources and further emphasizes the group’s nonpartisanship. 

Sydney Tirschwell ’25, a student staff worker at the CCCE focused on CarlsVote, explains that “oftentimes with Carleton and other small campuses, everything is very politically charged no matter what you’re doing and it makes people more scared to ask for information about things they don’t know and maybe feel like they should know, and voting is a really good example of that.” She notes that in the 2022 election cycle, the group ran a series of successful events to get students talking and thinking about voting, including the “Let’s TacoBout Voting” event, which boasted an attendance of over 100 students in 2022. Tirschwell, along with several others, is spearheading this year’s efforts to educate students on voting through posters, flyers, shirts, pins, stickers and more. 

In addition to the nonpartisan CarlsVote, other groups on campus are encouraging  students to vote, especially in favor of specific candidates. Carleton Democrats, a political group on campus advocating for the election of Democrats at all levels of office, has its sights set on both the presidential election and two local races in Minnesota’s second congressional district; it endorsed Angie Craig for congressperson and Kristi Pursell for representative.

Although Minnesota’s second congressional district, comprised of the southern Metro area of the Twin Cities and surrounding rural areas, tend to skew towards the left, the district is decidedly purple.

Craig faces a particularly tight race. Gabe Kaplan ’25, current president and former treasurer of Carleton Democrats, emphasizes that  “[I]f we get an extra 500 votes on campus, that is a large amount of [Craig’s] potential winning margin and potentially quite impactful if it allows the next Democrat president, hopefully Kamala Harris, to pass more legislation on climate change, reproductive rights, and other issues.” In their quest to get these additional votes, Carleton Democrats is focusing on both on and off-campus measures, including door-knocking and staffing phone banks around Northfield and relational campaigns on the Carleton campus. Kaplan hopes that, by encouraging Carleton students to become politically engaged in the Northfield community and voice their beliefs to their peers about important political issues, Carleton Democrats will be able to make a significant difference in these closely-contested races. 

The 2024 presidential election marks the first time that Carleton data will be included in the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement (NSLVE), a service through Tufts University that measures the student body voter registrations and turnout rates of colleges and universities across the United States. Carleton enrolled in the NSLVE after the 2020 presidential elections first recorded data came from the 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election, although this data has not yet been released. Participating in the NSLVE will allow Carleton to compare its student voter turnout rate to peer institutions such as St. Olaf College — which recorded the highest voter turnout rate in 2020 — and gain an increased understanding of the efficacy of programs such as CarlsVote. 

Both Trischwell and Kaplan urge eligible students to go to the polls on November 5. After all, in the words of Kaplan, casting a ballot “is one of the best means for effecting change in this country.”