Cal Poly won first place in the California University and College Ballot Bowl for registering the highest number of voters at a California State University campus for the 2024 election season.
The university registered 1,531 students to vote, representing nearly 7% of newly-registered students, according to an ASI press release.
The Ballot Bowl was created under the California Secretary of State’s Students Vote Project to foster friendly competition among colleges, encourage voter registration and promote civic engagement, the Students Vote Project team said in an email to Mustang News.
The competition was divided in three categories: total number of students registered, percentage of students registered, and the best Civic and Voter Empowerment Action Plan.
ASI initiated its voter registration efforts during Mustang Move-In in September, 2024 to catch up to other Cal State University campuses that started school earlier due to the semester system, said Maya McClain, ASI secretary of student engagement and a political science senior.
“We start at a disadvantage from all of the other schools that start much earlier than we do,” McClain said. “We had less than two months before the election happened from when school started.”
ASI boothed weekly in the University Union and conducted a large social media campaign, McClain explained. The team offered weekly office hours as well as social media and event toolkits as resources to help participants, according to the Students Vote Project team.
“We really were here [on] day one,” McClain said.
One of ASI’s most effective initiatives was a freshman voter drive, which involved knocking on doors in the freshman dorms to discuss voter registration.
“It’s a snowball effect,” Ogden said. “It’s not just the student that you’re talking with that you’re impacting. They’re going to tell their roommates, they’re going to tell their friends, and then the whole effort continues to build.”
ASI also organized a Meet Your Candidates Day, where more than 200 students met with city council candidates. This initiative aimed to connect students to candidates on their ballots, McClain said.
“My goal was to empower students to want to be involved, to care about voting and go do their research,” McClain said. “I think that we really accomplished that.”
