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Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven co-authored an essay titled Celebrate voting: A different approach to securing a democratic American future in the June 20 issue of The Hill with Marc Gropin, a professor at George Mason University.

The newly formed Hamilton Coalition for Justice and Democracy, born of a commitment to protect America’s democracy, held its inaugural meeting on Nov. 5 in response to President Trump’s false and problematic claims about the 2020 election. Thursday evening’s event attracted around 80 participants, including both students and faculty.

She’d planned to go home to India this summer, but instead the pandemic trapped Isha Parkhi ’21 in the U.S. With no internship in sight, she jumped on a surprise email from the College that landed in her inbox: An alumna was looking for a film student to help make a movie about the Suffrage movement.

In 2018 HamVotes, a nonpartisan team of both administrators and student ambassadors, ramped up its presence on campus, organizing events to promote voter registration and increase voter turnout.

Nicole Taylor ’19 has been helping Hamilton students vote since her first year on campus. Taylor explained, “I would be talking to my new friends about politics and I’d say, ‘Well, you know, the only way you can really voice your opinion at this stage in your life is to vote. Are you registered to vote?’ and they’d be seniors and they’d say, ‘No.’” This led her to teach some of her peers about the registration process and ultimately helped foster her passion for campus voter engagement.

It was July, 1920, just before the presidential election. Seven decades of women had worked for this moment, for the 19th amendment to be ratified, for the woman’s voice to be heard on the ballot. Thirty-five states had said yes and it was all left in the hands of one state. Tennessee ratified and 27 million women were able to vote.

Utica-based FM station WUTQ declared Philip Klinkner “pretty much spot on” after conducting live interviews the day of and the day after Super Tuesday with the James S. Sherman Professor of Government. Klinkner offered predictions and analysis of the outcomes. Syracuse’s Post-Standard also sought his perspectives on the previous day’s voting in an article titled Super Tuesday takeaways from 5 CNY political observers.

In a lengthy article titled “Voter Turnout in U.S. Mayoral Elections Is Pathetic, But It Wasn't Always This Way - A short history of how America’s urban voters stopped showing up at the polls” in The Atlantic’s CityLab, Philip Klinkner, the James S. Sherman Professor of Government, was quoted extensively. 

Despite being the world’s oldest continuous democracy, the United States has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the developed world. Peter Adelfio ’13 and Benjamin Anderson ’14 have been awarded a Levitt Group Research Grant to study this paradox by conducting a controlled experiment on methods of increasing voter turnout. They’re being advised by James S. Sherman Professor of Government Philip Klinkner.