Students Mobilizing for Election Day is a non-partisan umbrella organization created by Ohio PIRG, the Oberlin College Democrats (OC Dems), and the College chapter of the ACLU as part of an effort to register Oberlin students to vote in the 2004 elections.

SMED plan to register new students to vote during the College’s registration period. They are also working with ResLife and RAs to include voter registration in the first mandatory hall meeting. Plans are also underway to bring a convocation speaker to campus to give a lecture dealing with registration and voting. Their major goal is to get 537 voters, the same number that decided the 2000 election in Florida, registered on campus in two weeks.

SMED also hopes to partner with various identity-based organizations on campus to reach more of the student body.

“There are large portions of this campus that are not registered to vote. We need to reach out to organizations that may be better at reaching certain groups on campus,” said first-year OC Democrat, Charles Sohne.

“Even on a campus as political as Oberlin we can still increase the voting rates of students,” senior Dena Iverson, Board Chair of Ohio PIRG said, “Often students will plan on voting absentee in their home state and forget or not start the process soon enough.

Whether it’s Republican, Democrat, Independent or Green, SMED wants to go beyond the Oberlin staples of political involvement like protesting, and get students to express their opinions through voting as well.”

Iverson emphasizes Ohio’s importance for the 2004 election.

“Ohio is incredibly important in the 2004 election,” he said. “No Republican has won without Ohio in the past 120 years. This means that no matter what ticket you are voting on that Ohio is a key battleground state. That gives us a huge voice in Oberlin,”

Sohne believes that the number of registered voters on campus could make a crucial difference in election results. “With the number of registrations that we are hoping to get next year, Oberlin is in the unique situation where we very well could swing the most important national election in at least a quarter century.”