Ongoing efforts by the team at Lake Michigan College to teach civic engagement are paying off, as the institution has been designated once again as a “Voter Friendly Campus” by national, nonpartisan organizations Campus Vote Project and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA).
LMC joins 15 other colleges and universities in the state of Michigan and 231 in the United States who earned the designation for promoting democratic engagement efforts for students on campus. It is the second consecutive election that LMC has been honored with the designation. The college was previously named a “Voter Friendly Campus” in 2019 for work during the 2018 mid-term election.
LMC Political Science Instructor and LMC Votes! Coordinator Tiffany Bohm says, “Being named a Voter Friendly Campus recognizes our continued efforts to teach our students about civic engagement and how it applies to their everyday lives,” and adds, “Our students helped their friends and family get involved in the democratic process by promoting voter registration and helping the community get to their polling locations on election day.”
Before the pandemic, the LMC Votes! team held several drives on campus to register new voters and update existing voter registrations, and partnered with the local chapter of the League of Women Voters to help educate voters on the issues.
Following the state shutdown, LMC Votes! offered online community forums, used social media pages to continue community engagement, and created and distributed LMC Votes! face masks on LMC’s campuses. They hosted presidential and vice presidential debate watch parties on Facebook and Twitter, and LMC’s political science students created blog posts on LMCVotes.com. Campus Vote Project fellow, Madeline Dale, also worked with state-level liaisons to run a state-wide student engagement conference in May 2020.
The mission of the Voter Friendly Campus designation is to bolster efforts that help students overcome barriers to participating in the political process. Colleges and universities are evaluated based on plans to register, educate, and turnout student voters in 2020, how they facilitated voter engagement efforts on their campuses, and a final analysis of their efforts – all in the face of the upheaval caused by a global pandemic. The designation is valid through December 2022.
