By Nina McCambridge
On March 16, the Campus Vote Project held their Spring 2024 Democracy Summit at Carnegie Mellon. The event focused on civic engagement, especially student voting. Three undergraduate students and around 10 older community members attended.
The keynote speaker was Vivian Chang, Carnegie Mellon alumna and director of Asian Americans United, an advocacy group that is currently working on blocking the construction of an arena in Philadelphia. While she majored in physics and had been planning on becoming a software engineer, she decided to join AmeriCorps instead because it seemed more fulfilling. Now, she does grassroots organizing.
While she spends much of her life on non-voting forms of activism, Chang said, “voting is just as important a tool as any of these other tools in the toolbox.” She recalls how Asians were once restricted from immigrating to and voting in America, and sees voting as a way of “honoring the journey” of her immigrant parents.
The next speech was from Dr. Lara Putnam, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, whose talk was entitled “Disinformation or Toxic Distrust? Social Media, News Media, and Election Integrity.”
She distinguished between misinformation and disinformation — with disinformation being “falsehoods that are knowingly and intentionally propagated,” while misinformation is propagated with innocent intentions. She also describes something called “malinformation,” which isn’t actually false, but which implies the wrong thing about the bigger picture.
Putnam said that people are naturally biased towards believing those who agree with their “identity, affiliation, and values.” These sorts of heuristics may be useful in small-scale life, but “in today’s information environment, they can really lead us astray.”
She laments that we no longer get our information through respected institutions, where different parties could veto the information being spread. Instead, we are receiving more information, and that information is individually, algorithmically curated. Now, she said, people distrust fact-checked institutions, so they will have no standard to compare information to.
This was followed by a group discussion led by the Vote Riders — which helps people navigate voter ID laws — and the Campus Vote Project. Attendees discussed the importance of voting, the misconception that your vote doesn’t matter, and ways to convince students to vote. The three students in attendance agreed that our classmates often feel too uninformed to make a decision.
Emily Davis, a legal fellow at the Fair Elections Center, reviewed information on election law as it applies to students in Pennsylvania. The Fair Elections Center is the parent organization of the Campus Vote Project. Davis told the audience how under the Higher Education Act, campuses “have to help make it easier for students on their campus to vote.” Also, the Department of Education now allows “campuses to use federal work-study money, to pay their students to help register other students to vote.”
Davis reminded the audience that students can register either in their hometowns or in Pittsburgh. Davis was also glad to explain that Governor Shapiro made voter registration opt-out (rather than opt-in) when people get their driver’s licenses in Pennsylvania. She said this has led to “over 47,000 new voter registrations,” with even registration between parties. She encouraged the audience to help students register, and to call the election protection hotline if we notice any problems at the polls.
The final speech was given by Chuck Black and Joseph Olah from the Campus Vote Project. They described their plans for a “Pennsylvania State Voting Rights Act,” which would provide various reforms that would attempt to make the vote more representative of the actual population of Pennsylvania. They also discussed success with redistricting in Pennsylvania.
There is still time to register to vote in the Pennsylvania primaries — the deadline is April 8.
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