Penn Leads the Vote executive co-directors | Yes, we can — vote

“Have you voted?” The chances of someone asking you this question today are enormously high. Penn students proved in 2004, 2006 and 2008 that our opinions deserve to be heard. We should not let down our school, our civic duty or ourselves. Let’s vote again in 2010.

And here’s how:

• Go to theDP.com/2010midterms to learn where to vote and become informed on the candidates’ important positions.

• Go to your polling location and vote.

• Rally with Penn President Amy Gutmann at 4:30 p.m. on College Green. Enjoy Penn Leads the Vote T-shirts and free Insomnia Cookies.

• Make phone calls reminding people to vote by coming to PLTV’s “War Room” at 5 p.m. in Leadership Hall, located at 3814 Walnut St.

• Answer, “Yes, I voted!”

• Ask everybody you see, “Have you voted?”

One thousand, five hundred, twenty-one. That’s the number of people who voted on campus in the 2006 midterm election. In 2004 — the year Penn Leads the Vote started — Penn students helped increase voter turnout by 280 percent compared with the 2000 presidential election. And Penn led the vote in 2006 with a nearly 300-percent increase in voters on campus compared to 2002, when only 509 students voted.

Today, you should lead the vote by making the number of Penn voters more than 1,521 for the 2010 election.

“Yes, I voted!”

It doesn’t matter if you are a first-time voter or you are building a legacy of commitment to our democracy. You’re happy to be a student at Penn, where voting on campus is a precedent, institutionalized in us as Quakers.

Pennsylvania is blessed with close elections in the Senate, and an interesting competition for governor. Organizations on campus led extremely successful registration drives, registering over 1,000 new voters. The status quo political climate demands an ear — the economy has not picked up, our country is at war in a foreign country, Senatorial candidates might be witches, the rent might be too damn high and many feel the need to “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” So, have you voted?

“Yes, I voted!”

At first, you were probably hesitant to vote because this election doesn’t have the hype or the abundance of information that occurred in the 2008 election. But then you realized that you don’t have to be a perfectly informed voter to have a say in this lower-salience election. You voted because what the government does in the next two years with regard to the debt, social security, health care and domestic and foreign policy will directly impact our generation.

You will answer, “Yes, I voted!” because you want to have a job after you graduate. You don’t believe it when you hear that this is the first time in 30 years that people believe the next generation of this country is going to be worse off than the previous one. You want to shape the direction that America takes for the rest of posterity.

So at the end of the day, you will exclaim, “Yes, I voted!”

You wanted to prove to the world that students and young voters can be important in an election. You wanted to yell at politicians, asking to be heard. You wanted to listen to P. Diddy because you know if you didn’t vote, you would die. And you didn’t want to die. You wanted to vote. Otherwise, our generation will be written off as the ambivalent, ignorant stereotype that our predecessors fated for us.

But don’t just vote — tell your friends to vote, too. Prove that Penn is a step above the rest, that students have a voice to be heard and that Penn can lead the vote, again, in 2010.

Jared Fries, Kelly Higgins, Mariama Perry, Pam Putnam and Eric Rubin are the executive co-directors of Penn Leads the Vote. Fries, Perry and Putnam are College seniors, and Rubin and Higgins are College juniors. They can be reached at pennleadsthevote@gmail.com.

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