Enter, register and vote.
That’s what San Jose State students living in Santa Clara County can do now at the voting center in the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library.
“[Voting] was easy,” undeclared freshman Lulu Ashenfelder said after casting her ballot at the new on-campus vote center Monday. “I was passing by and didn’t know [the vote center] was here until this morning.”
Elected officials, San Jose State students and campus administrators celebrated the opening of the university’s first-ever voting center Thursday for the March 3 presidential primary election.
Located on the ground floor of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, in the space of the former Friends of the Library Bookstore, the center is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day until March 3, when it will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Ashenfelder, who’s from Sonoma County, now lives in the dorms and registered to vote in Santa Clara County right before casting her ballot.
“It took a second, but it was easy,” she said. “Just go do it, it’s not hard. It takes a half hour of your time. There’s no reason not to.”
Any eligible citizen with residency in Santa Clara County can register to vote directly at the vote center, if they were not already automatically registered to vote.
Students can also drop off their vote-by-mail ballots at the voting center or in the drop-off boxes located in front of Clark Hall and in the center of Campus Village.
U.S. House Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Anna Eshoo joined California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, Assembly member Ash Kalra, Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters Shannon Bushey and SJSU President Mary Papazian in cutting the ribbon to open the center.
“Young people turned to vote in 2018 in record numbers, and I know that increased accessibility and services that come with a vote center, especially right here on campus, will make strides on how civic engagement and casting a vote occur among busy college students,” Kalra said.
Former Santa Clara County Supervisor Ken Yeager, now a political science lecturer at SJSU, told the Spartan Daily that the voting center will bring out even more students to vote.
He said when he was a student at the university during the ’70s, he was very eager to vote for president during the Vietnam War, but now it will be even easier for interested Spartans.
“If you’re the one who’s really excited about voting, you can knock on dorms and [go vote] right now, [it’s] much easier than driving people to their polling place,” Yeager said.
Margarita Figueroa, a political science and justice studies senior, said that before the 2018 midterm elections, she and others registered many students to vote through SJSU Votes, a get-out-the-vote initiative.
SJSU Votes was a project of the Political Participation class taught by Mary Currin-Percival, a political science professor.
“It reinforces the passion for what we do and what we want to do,” Figueroa said. “Even if you don’t want to vote for a president, vote local.”
For Papazian, the importance of having students vote was simple.
“Elections matter, voting matters,” Papazian said. “Voting may in fact be the fundamental expression of our civic engagement.”
Mauricio La Plante contributed reporting to this article.
