Turnout below average

The significance of voting has taken on new meaning while Florida recounts county ballots, making sure each individual ballot is counted correctly. A small group not only can make a difference, but might decide the presidency of the United States.\n"I didn't think my vote would have made a difference then, but now I do," said freshman John West, who chose not to vote in Tuesday's election. After Florida's close race, West said he now believes he should have voted.\nAccording to the Monroe County Board of Elections, only 43.9 percent of eligible voters braved long waits at several polling sites to vote locally Tuesday. Voter turnout for Monroe County was not only below both the national average of 51 percent and the Indiana state average of 49 percent, but had the lowest turnout of any county in the state, according to the Indiana Secretary of State's Web site.\nDeputy county clerk Tara Stogsdill said the low turnout can be attributed to students who come to Indiana and register to vote, but don't take their names off the registration when they graduate and leave the state. She said Indiana law prohibits the elections board from purging those names from the list.\n"It's very hard to say what the actual voter turnout was," Stogsdill said, "but I think it would be at least 50 percent."\nFifty percent turnout was on par for the state, but nationally, voter turnout has only risen slightly since the 1996 election, and overall turnout has been dropping steadily since the 1960s, said Political Science Professor Gerald Wright.\nWright attributes the decreasing turnout to the lack of participation by younger generations, which, he said, don't have an immediate attachment to politics. \n"They don't see what politics has to do with them," he said, and cited Vietnam and the Civil Rights movements as events that tied previous younger generations to politics. "Younger generations are turning out in even lower numbers than their parents when they were young."\nLack of publicity was a factor for some students, said freshman Katie Kessler. She said although she knew one student who had gotten a postcard in the mail, the rest had no idea where to vote, and had visited others sites before coming to Briscoe Quad. Kessler said she found it especially hard to identify polling sites in the residence halls, since there were not large signs posted like at many other locations.\n"I was about to give up if (Briscoe) wasn't the place," she said.\nSenior Sarah Boyle and several others waited in line to vote for the presidential election because they felt they could make a difference in whether or not Green Party candidate Ralph Nader would achieve the 5 percent popular vote necessary to get federal funding, but they said they did not generally think their vote would matter when it came to the presidential election. \n"I don't know anything about the other Monroe County elections, so I'm just going to vote for the president and governor," Boyle said.