The Wake County Municipal Elections took place Tuesday, with voter turnout at the Pullen Community Center reaching 368 amid a humid, rainy day.
Pullen Community Center, located just off campus, was the voting site for most students registered on campus. In comparison, 1,900 students voted at Pullen Community Center in 2016.
According to Lindsey Holmes, a poll worker at the site, the turnout was average and steady.
Natalie Collier, a first-year studying biomedical engineering, who is registered to vote in Wake County, chose not to vote due to time constraints.
“I’m in classes here at NC State and I had my first class at 8:30 in the morning and I will finish my last class at 6 p.m. and then after that I’ll be occupied with Krispy Kreme Challenge and things like that,” Collier said. “A lot of it is that I don’t feel like I have a lot of time to do things and to make that effort to leave campus.”
According to the Wake County Board of Elections, there are 706,987 registered voters in Wake County.
“I feel like the place that politics are in our country, and especially with local politics, there is so much controversy and I feel like a lot of the ways that people are presenting themselves and presenting their ideas are not necessarily how they’ve acted in the past,” Collier said. “I feel like a lot of what they’re saying is to appeal to a certain group of people so that they can win.”
Carl Hintze, a fourth-year studying mathematics, works with North Carolina Public Interest Research Group (NCPIRG), a nonprofit, nonpartisan student activist organization that aids students in fighting against powerful interests.
“I think there are a lot of students involved in the political process,” Hintze said. “I think that young voters are less involved in local politics and may know less about the candidates or the local process, and for students, they may be registered to vote in Raleigh, but they might not be from Raleigh so they might not feel familiar enough with the local politics.”
Hintze said that students could play a major role in shaping election turnout if they were to turn out to vote in higher numbers.
“I think that students can play a really important role because voter turnout is low in the typical local election,” Hintze said. “Students can have a large impact on the results of an election if they were to turnout in numbers to vote.”
Ream Elzatery, a third-year studying human biology, believes that the lack of high turnout was a result of students not being concerned about local elections as much as federal elections.
“Not enough people understand the significance of local politics,” Elzatery said. “People are more concerned with the general election and politics at a federal level because that’s more publicized, but not enough people know that local politics has the most significant impact on our lives.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, since the presidential election of 1964, voters of ages ranging from 18 to 24 have consistently proven lower voter turnout than all other age groups.
“I think it’s important that college students vote for the same reason that everyone votes,” said Julia Holter, a first-year graduate student studying statistics. “We are citizens and it is a real privilege that we even have democratic elections.”
Luke Perrin contributed reporting for this story.
