The Election Night Watch Event is one of a variety of efforts to encourage civic engagement across campus.
After voters from across the country headed to the polls on Election Day Tuesday, Elon students, faculty and staff gathered in the Moseley Center to digest the results.
The Election Night Watch Event again drew a healthy crowd of people from across the political spectrum to see the winners in local, state and federal electoral contests. The watch event is just one of the efforts on campus to foster civic engagement among all members of the Elon community, whether they are casting a vote for the first time, or thirtieth time.
Throughout the day, Elon provided shuttle rides from the Center for Arts to the two Alamance County polling places that serve Elon students. Along with casting ballots locally, countless other students used absentee ballots to weigh in on races in their home precincts.
Watching the returns with his COR 110 class was Mark Dalhouse, director of Study USA and assistant professor, who said that he has seen a shift in the level of civic engagement among Elon students during his five years at the university. Nearly all the members of his class, all first-year students, had registered to vote and planned to cast absentee ballots, which represented a spike from previous years.
“I think throughout the last year, there has been a real increase in civic commitment with this cohort,” Dalhouse said. “I tell them, if you believe in something and you believe in it passionately, go out and vote. There is a definite shift, and I take that as a positive.”
Students Tuesday night chatted about the results they were seeing displayed on the big screen or followed along on their laptops. As part of its live two-hour Election Night broadcast, Elon News Network had a reporter interviewing students and faculty and reporting back to the anchors in the studio in the School of Communications.
Joseph Perry, a first-year student from Durham, had been studying in Belk Library earlier, but was drawn to the Moseley gathering because of his love of politics. He had been trying to get some work done, but kept coming back to news sites to track the results, and figured he should go join fellow students to watch the returns together in Moseley.
“I told my friends, ‘that is where I need to be,'” Perry said.
Perry had traveled home to vote in his first general election. He said he “absolutely loves politics,” and fittingly, is majoring in political science. “Everything that happens in the world — education, infrastructure, so many things — comes back to politics and who you vote for,” Perry said.
Many of these efforts to help students engage in democracy were organized by the Elon Political Engagement Work Group, the Council on Civic Engagement and the Kernodle Center for Service Learning and Community Engagement.
Later this week, Elon students, faculty and staff will have an opportunity to analyze the results of the midterm elections. A post-election panel discussion featuring faculty members from the Department of Political Science will be held Thursday, Nov. 8, at 4:15 p.m. in Yeager Recital Hall in the Center for the Arts.