As a heated U.S. midterm election campaign enters its final week, American students at McGill appear to be voting in fairly large numbers, despite the hassle of requesting absentee ballots and the lack of a presidential contest.
When Barack Obama squared off against John McCain for the presidency two years ago, students on campus got involved in droves. McGill Students for Obama, a campus club started by law student Kevin Grumberg, held voter registration drives and organized trips to battleground states where McGill students went knocking on doors. On election day, hundreds of students packed Gert’s to watch the returns.
Though the atmosphere is more subdued this year, most of the students interviewed for this article said they were still planning to vote, the majority for Democrats.
According to Marc Seltzer, the Montreal chapter chairman of Democrats Abroad Canada, about half a dozen McGill students have approached him regarding volunteering to man phones and register voters, including Cassandra Zawilski, a U2 Psychology student from the San Francisco Bay Area.
“Most of my work has been within my own group of friends, trying to get them registered and make sure they’ve requested their absentee ballots,” she said.
Estimates vary for how many Americans live in Canada and are eligible to vote. According to Kenneth Sherman, the nation chairman of Democrats Abroad Canada, the number is between 500,000 and 750,000, though two years ago the Obama campaign estimated that up to a million Americans may live in the country.
Approximately 2,000 Americans are enrolled at McGill, making it one of the largest concentrations of Americans in Canada. Although the administration does not keep figures for where students are registered to vote, many hail from Democratic-leaning states.
“A lot of McGill students come from the Northeast, in places that aren’t nearly as contested as the rest of the U.S.,” said Cathal Rooney-Cespedes, U3 Economics and Political Science.
Rooney-Cespedes votes in Massachusetts 10th Congressional District, where longtime Democratic Congressman Bill Delahunt’s decision not to seek re-election has ignited a tight race to fill the seat. Rooney-Cespedes said he plans to vote mostly for Democrats, but he’s not against the Republicans retaking the House of Representatives.
“I think there needs to be an ideological check,” he added. “I’m all for reform, but it needs to be done fiscally.”
Despite the general enthusiasm for Democratic candidates on Tuesday, several students interviewed said they were planning on splitting the ballott for at least one candidate.
Yaakov Stern, a U2 Biochemistry student from Florida who has volunteered for the Democrats since the age of 16, said he plans on voting for Charlie Crist, the Republican governor who decided to run for Senate as an independent after losing to Marco Rubio, a Tea Party-backed candidate, in the GOP primary. But he’s supporting the Democratic challenger in Florida’s Seventh Congressional District, where John L. Mica, who Stern called a “conservative gun-nut of a Congressman,” is running for re-election.
Not all American students are voting, of course.
Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite, a U2 History student who grew up in Canada but is registered to vote in Connecticut, said she had not requested a ballot, despite voting two years ago. Her actions reflect a broader trend—just 25 per cent of Americans voted in the 2006 midterms, compared to 52 per cent in the 2008 presidential elections.
But Zawilski is voting, she said, to combat the perception that youth are not politically aware.
“I don’t want our generation to be seen as this monolithic, apathetic group,” she said, “because I don’t think that’s true.”
