Some 70% of students surveyed by Mustang News said they planned to vote yes on Proposition 50, in support of temporarily redrawing California’s congressional maps. This compares to the 56.22%% who voted yes in San Luis Obispo County and 63.9% overall as of Nov. 7.
Proposition 50, the recent California ballot initiative which passed in the special election, asked voters on Nov. 4 to approve new congressional districts that favor Democrats. This proposition comes after the Texas Legislature passed a new plan in August to increase the number of congressional seats for the Republican Party and maintain its majority in response to pressure from President Donald Trump, as previously reported by the Texas Tribune.
READ MORE: Early voting shows Proposition 50 leading by 11K votes in San Luis Obispo County
Mustang News received responses from 643 students, 16% of those who received the survey. Of the students that indicated they will be voting on Proposition 50, 70.12% said they were voting yes, whether that be in person or through mail-in ballot.
“I believe that Californians should exercise their state right to propose citizen propositions to make a move to correct this cheating from other states for our democracy,” Nathan Perez, a city and regional planning junior, said.
Perez described how it is in California tradition to let citizens decide whether to participate in midterm redistricting, while other states are doing so without citizen support.
Nutrition freshman Kate Vander Veen opposes Proposition 50 because she does not believe gerrymandering is good in any capacity.
“It is important to display the ideas that we have in this state fairly and the way we do it with a nonpartial organization is the way to do it,” Vander Veen said. “We shouldn’t give the power back to the state legislatures to section districts.”
READ MORE: Will Proposition 50 pass in California?
About 39.5% of the survey respondents said that they believed half of Cal Poly students were aware of the upcoming special election. Methods of awareness, whether that be television advertisements, social media or conversations with parents, differed from student-to-student.
Kate McHugh, a political science senior who supports Proposition 50, first became aware of the proposition from reading the news. Continued discussions in her Voting Rights and Representation class, POLS 445, also helped her to feel more informed as a voter.
“I feel like the fact that the president is outwardly telling Republican majority states that they should partisanly gerrymander their maps to give the Republicans a better chance of having more seats is going against the kind of system of checks and balances that we have,” McHugh said.
While McHugh says that non-partisan redistricting is the most fair way to redraw district lines, these times are unprecedented.
“I would normally support the nonpartisan way that we have to typically draw our lines, but in extenuating circumstances, which I would categorize these times, I can appreciate the need for more direct action against the president and his administration,” McHugh said.
History sophomore Ethan Lue leans towards voting yes on Proposition 50 because of the current political environment and what Trump is doing by asking states to redraw districts.
However, he thinks the proposition “is a bit antidemocratic as it is disenfranchising voter groups.”
Statistical Methods
3,992 students were randomly sampled and emailed out of 23,940 students listed on the directory provided to Mustang News by the university. Of the 3,992 students, 643 responded. The survey was open for 5 days, and students were emailed twice – once initially, and once as a follow-up.
This story originally appeared in a printed newspaper on Nov. 12. For more stories from the November print edition check out the featured print section on our website or the full edition.
