IU South Bend Professor Receives Grant to Analyze

Nationwide Voter Registration Drives on College Campuses

What is the best way to get college students to register for voting? Classroom registrations? Table registrations? E-mail?

Campuses across the county have conducted various approaches but no one is sure what is most effective.

Indiana University South Bend assistant professor Elizabeth Bennion will be examining the data in the upcoming months from more than 80 campuses on what works and what doesn’t get new voters registered.

Bennion teaches political science and has done a number of registration drives locally. IU South Bend and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) recently received a $215,000 grant from the Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM) at George Washington University to study registration methods. The award is supported by the Pew Charitable Trust.

GSPM’s Young Voters Strategies staff will work with 13 groups nationwide to register 350,000 young voters, of which 50,000 new voters will come from AASCU institutions. Each project will focus on registering a subset of young voters, including young African American, community college students, Latinos, evangelical youth, high school seniors, four-year college students, tech savvy-mobile phone users, young single women and students enrolled in four-year programs at public colleges and universities.

Each study group will use various techniques, such as peer-to-peer communications, e-mail, mobile phone messages or presentations.

Young Voter Strategies and a team of academic researchers will analyze each project to create a "Young Voter Toolkit." The toolkit, a compilation of 2006 registration results and best practices learned from a decade of youth outreach, will outline the nuts and bolts of involving young voters in elections and be available to key decision makers, opinion leaders, and nonprofits as they build their strategies for the 2008 election.

Bennion is the principal investigator for the 80-campus AASCU project and she is working with institutions from New York to California. “Each campus has agreed to the project, and we will measure what works” in the random field experiment. “There are no scientific studies, only anecdotal information” from past registration drives.

Bennion, along with co-investigator, University of Notre Dame political science professor David Nickerson, are planning to write several academic articles using the data collected from this large-scale study.

The work will begin in August and continue though the early fall. The analysis will begin in the winter and be completed next summer.

30

7.11.6

For further information contact Elizabeth Bennion at (574) 520-4128.