In the state of Massachusetts, voters are able to use absentee ballots validly if they: will be absent from their city or town on election day, have a physical disability that prevents their voting at the polling place and/or cannot vote at the polls due to religious beliefs. To be correctly used, the voter must have this ballot by the day they are going to the polls to vote.
Requesting an absentee ballot and receiving one before said date should not be extremely difficult, but for some college students, its a struggle. Numerous students have had terrible absentee ballot experience. Annie Armstrong, a junior at Emerson College from Atlanta, Georgia, thought she was ready to go to the polls, but she was wrong. “I thought I was totally on top of it the whole time until today (Super Tuesday). It was a huge bummer and I felt very hypocritical because I had been preaching about how important it is to vote. I wish there had been a simpler process.”
It wasn’t Armstrong’s first time applying for an absentee ballot; she was previously registered in Georgia. “It was certainly pretty complicated and there were a lot of tight deadlines that felt very intense,” she said.
Other students had the same situation happen. Carrie Mackevich, a sophomore from Chicago, was really hoping to vote on Super Tuesday. Mackevich filled out all the paperwork early and thought she would get her ballot in the mail before the day to vote. Sadly, she was wrong. “I was hoping to vote today. I sent everything in early, and still haven’t gotten anything, and I’m assuming I can’t vote without it.”
With Massachusetts being so close to New Hampshire, it isn’t surprising that approximately 15 percent of college students from New Hampshire decided to simply go home to vote, instead of dealing with absentee ballot issues. Jack Ganley’s permanent residency is in Salem, New Hampshire. He decided to go home to vote to completely avoid the process.
“I decided I didn't want to bother with registering in Massachusetts since I live so close. That’s also why I decided against an absentee ballot; I didn’t want to complicate things and wanted to make sure my vote counted,” Ganley said. “I’ve heard that the absentee system is rather imperfect.”
But New Yorker, Alyssa Dyal, had more personal reasons to why she wanted to vote, no matter the struggle with the absentee ballot. “My family comes from Guyana, and they have a parliament there and the problem is major corruption in the government, and police force, and no one will do much about it.” Dyal says, “I’m terrified that if people try to protest [absentee ballot] they will inadvertently cause the same thing here.”
Thankfully, her family went out on Super Tuesday, and was successfully able to vote. “I’ll be able to do so in later elections, I guess.”
“I’ve heard stories from my parents about their home country. and I wonder if the youth of today who choose not to vote actually know what they are giving up by doing so,” Dyal said. Dyal claims she would vote in New York City, but not in Massachusetts after this mishap. “I feel like everyone is pretty much for Bernie and the chance of Hillary taking the lead here is slim anyway. So my vote isn’t as effective here as it could be at home, where it’s pretty closely divided between the two candidates.”
But Blake Greenawalt, a sophomore from Vermont, refuses to vote in this upcoming election, claiming the election is not the “real deal.” “Our votes, at the end of the day, don’t actually matter that much because of the electoral college. And with this current system, my vote is actually worth a lot more than people from larger states, like California or Florida,” he said.
“In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote, but wasn’t president. It happened two other times. It was a system put in place because a lot of our population was uneducated.”
In the end, whether it’s problems with the absentee ballot or simply having problems with the whole election process in general, according to mass.gov there was a 33 percent decline of college voters in Massachusetts this year alone.
