It’s Election Day! CALPIRG’s New Voters Project is using today to keep up the unprecedented momentum!
This fall CALPIRG Students has been hard at work to help register and mobilize students to vote and participate in our democracy.
Our team has registered over 10,000 college students across the state! We —
- Worked at the University of California and 15 total campuses across the state including Cal States and private colleges.
- Made announcements in over 600 virtual classrooms about registering to vote or voting safely in their academic classes via Zoom.
- Did hundreds of hours of peer to peer voter registration phone-banking
- Worked with universities to send out 14 emails to the entire student body with a link to the CA Student Vote Project’s portal castudentvote.org
- Worked in coalition with the UC Students Association and the Cal State Students Association
- Partnered with the CA Secretary of State on the Ballot Bowl and many of our institutions made it into the top 10!
An intern with the UCLA chapter calling her friends to make sure they are registered!
The UC Davis Chapter phonebanking to register their peers to vote!
On the voter registration deadline, we did 150 class presentations in 1 day and sent 30,000 texts to make sure every college student across the state updated their registration!
We also co-hosted the “CA Student Voter Conference” with the UCs, private colleges, the Cal States, and the Secretary of State’s office to launch off our voter registration drives, and start making our plans for huge voter registration even before school started.
Student leaders like our CALPIRG Board Chair Nic Riani spoke at the conference about the work his chapter at UCLA has done to create a culture of voting on campus!
“It’s those one on one conversations, peer to peer that really help new voters make a plan to vote” – Nic Riani, CALPIRG Students Board Chair at the CA Student Voter Conference
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla speaking to over 300 students across California about the importance of voting!
We are not letting going virtual get us down. Students are excited as ever to get involved! We are running an incredibly robust volunteer and internship program where we have —
- Worked with 700 volunteers and 500 interns
- Had 900 student attendees at our campaign kick off meetings
- Expanded to 7 other schools in California, that now have clubs totalling nearly 100 consistent core group members
Fall Kickoff Meetings! Top row: UC Riverside (94 students), UC San Diego (110 students) Bottom Row: UCLA (123 students)
By Election Day today, we had signed up over 5,000 volunteer hours for phone-banking and today we have already surpassed our goal of contacting 70,000 students to help them cast their ballot. Our Election Day virtual Election “Vote-A-Thon”, co-hosted by CALPIRG, UCSA, and the Secretary of State’s Office is an all-day-long volunteer event to get out the vote, and features speakers like Senators Hannah Beth Jackson and Nancy Skinner, Vice Chancellors from UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego, and Student Government representatives from across the state! And many more!
Just a handful of our speakers! Top Row: Senator Hannah Beth Jackson, UC Irvine External Vice President Alan Calderon, Allyson Satterlund, Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, UCSD. Bottom Row: Brian Arao, Associate Dean of Students at UCSC, State Senator Nancy Skinner
We’re so proud of the work students did and are continuing to do to help their peers register and vote this Election. Young people are so excited to help shape their country’s future and will turn out in a big way this Election Day.