Voting

There are numerous student groups on campus that encourage civic engagement and civic discourse. These groups range from JumboVote, a nonpartisan student group that has endless resources to help Tufts students cast their ballot and engage in democracy, to CIVIC, a group that is committed to providing a forum for political debates and discussions. 

Each of these groups offers a different way to become involved with civic engagement on campus, and each is crucial to cultivating a culture of civic engagement at Tufts. Students at Tufts are passionate about democracy and civic engagement because it is vital to so many of our student groups’ missions. 

Some groups you may be interested in may include JumboVote, Civic Engagement Ambassadors, CIVIC, Tufts Dems, Tuft Republicans, Tufts PPA, Tufts Climate Action, ACTION, Federalist Society, Graduate Student Council, and TCU Senate.

Federal Elections Explained 

Decide Where to Vote

Most students who are eligible to vote have the option to register and vote at their permanent residence or at their local/campus address. You may consider which location has issues you care about more or know more about, the ease of attending debates or otherwise accessing information about candidates and positions, or which option will make it easiest for you to cast your ballot. Learn more from JumboVote’s guide.

Learn About Offices, Candidates, and Ballot Questions

Once you’ve decided where you will vote, learn about the candidates and issues that will be on your ballot. Usually national contests get the most attention, but you’ll often have the opportunity to vote for many lower profile offices or issues, which requires a little discovery on your part.

Local elections are extremely important because they happen on a smaller scale and typically have lower turnout, meaning your vote has a much larger impact! It’s important to be informed and educated about elections happening in your area. Here are non-partisan sources you can use to find out about elections happening in your area and learn about candidates or issues to vote on. 

• Ballotpedia collects information about candidates and issues that will be on ballots to create informational resources for voters. 
• Vote411 provides voting information on local races throughout the country.
• Visit candidate websites and read about their policies.  These websites can usually be found by googling their name! 
• KnowYourVote provides side-by-side comparisons of candidates on various issues for select elections.
• Find local news outlets! The more local the race is, the more local news source you should find. You might search for local access TV, a newspaper for the town, local TV stations, or local public media such as NPR or PBS.  Many local outlets host debates or forums for candidates or send a questionnaire to candidates asking about their views on issues and then publish candidates answers side by side for comparison. 
• If you are voting in Massachusetts, the Tufts Center for State Policy Analysis does thorough research on each state ballot question so voters can have objective information about their choice.
• Many issue-based groups will endorse candidates and post this publicly. Interest groups like the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and the National Rifle Association are two such examples. If there are issues you particularly want to support, you could look for candidates who are endorsed by related issue organizations.

In local elections, sometimes it is not obvious what the responsibilities of a particular office are. What is a city councilor or town selectman responsible for in your town? What does the Secretary of State do in your state?  How much influence do state senators have in your local legislature?  What does a school board member get to decide?  Ballotopedia and Vote411 include descriptions of the responsibilities of each office on the ballot along with information about the candidates.  In addition, you can check out your state constitution, municipal charter, or the official government website of the current office holder to get a sense of the role.

Where possible, look beyond what a candidate says they will do to determine what they have done in the past. If a candidate has held office in the past, their votes on issues are public. If a candidate hasn’t held public office, you could look at their accomplishments in whatever their past roles have been.

Deciding Who or What to Vote For

Your vote is entirely your choice–vote for the candidates and positions you think are best for yourself and the rest of the country/state/city who will be impacted by the outcome of the election.  Voting is done by secret ballot throughout the U.S., so you never have to tell anyone–and there’s no way for anyone to find out–who or what you voted for.  Voter rolls are public record, which means people can see whether you are registered to vote, and whether you voted or not, but nobody can see who or what you voted for.

You can reflect on your vote by thinking about each race and asking yourself:

• What’s the most important thing someone in this office will do?  Which candidate is most qualified to do that?
• What are the positives and negatives of each candidates’ prior work/life experiences?
• What are the positions that are most important to me in the short and long term?  What is each candidates’ view on that position?
• What values are most important to me?  To what extent do these candidates share my values?
• Do I have any stakes in the outcome of the election? What is important to me?

You don’t have to be an expert on any particular policy or situation to be an informed voter.  Nobody knows everything about every issue that could come up in a campaign.  Use your judgment, common sense, education, values, and preferences to decide how to vote. It’s normal to have a situation where no candidate aligns perfectly with all of your positions.

Preparing to Vote

Often a single ballot involves making many decisions.  It may feel daunting to walk into your polling place or open your mail in ballot and see a long list of candidates and ballot initiatives. In some states, residents have the opportunity to vote on ballot propositions in addition to candidates for office. There are numerous ways to help make a long ballot feel more approachable and help you vote based on the work you have done in advance. 

Many states allow voters to bring in pieces of paper with them to the voting booth to help them remember who and what they plan to vote for. If your state allows this, writing down your voting choices and bringing it with you can ease your stress in the voting booth! If you are voting by mail, you don’t have to worry about this as much–but be sure to avoid posting a picture of your filled-out ballot online!

Follow the News

Understanding what’s happening in the community where you will be voting and the country at large can be really useful in helping you make up your own mind about what issues are important to you, what positions you want to support, and what the range of views people hold on a topic.  You don’t need to be an expert on topics to have an opinion–in fact, almost nobody voting will be an expert on any particular issue.  Following the news is a good way to get a general overview of the most important things happening, new laws under consideration, issues in the community, world affairs, government budgets, and more.

Tufts students get free subscriptions to major news outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times and GlobalPost.  In addition, students get a deep discount on Boston Globe subscriptions. There are other news organizations whose content is free to the public, including National Review, RealClearPolitics and National Public Radio, which has local member stations. The local stations for Greater Boston are WBUR and WGBH. The Tufts Daily also provides free access to news about Tufts’ host communities, Medford and Somerville.  Most of these publications also have social media accounts you can follow to get quick updates into your feed.

Information Literacy

How do I know any particular source is trustworthy? Professional news sources do a variety of things to prove their commitment to accuracy, including clearly differentiating opinion columns from objective news, indicating where and how information in stories was obtained, and are willing to correct errors in their reporting when they may arise. These are not the only things that reliable news sources do, but they are easy things to look out for when reading the news. Trustworthy and reliable outlets are also not trying to push any sort of agenda, and if what you are reading feels biased or one-sided, it may be. Reliable news publications should only seek to inform their readers, not sway their opinion in any way. 

Burst Your News & Information Bubble

Many of us have social media feeds and email inboxes that mostly give us news and political content that we agree with or emotionally react to. We do this because we like our views to be validated by what we are seeing and we like to create spaces where we can connect with those who agree with us. This is a phenomenon researchers refer to as confirmation bias. Social media algorithms intentionally push users to see and engage with content they agree with, further isolating users in groups of other like-minded groups. This can create an echo chamber, where everything we see reinforces our perspectives and confirms our biases. 

When you are deciding who or what to vote for, it can be useful to break out of your echo chamber so you can vote for candidates and positions you think are best rather than being influenced by others.  Fortunately, there are quite a few tactics that can be employed to push beyond these echo chambers.

One way to overcome our echo chambers is to follow people you disagree with or read sources that you don’t always first turn to. This doesn’t mean you need to believe fake news or engage with inflammatory content, but finding content that is thoughtful and pragmatic could help us confront our own biases. Exploring beyond our typical media outlets is important for creating a healthy and well balanced media diet.

Another important step to getting out of these online bubbles is to take a step back from social media and engage with everything you see online critically. Engage in in-person conversations with people who hold differing views to have respectful, direct conversations. Remember that people intentionally post false and inflammatory things for likes, views, and clicks. 

Please review the Declaration on Freedom of Expression at Tufts University and the Policy on Political Activities.