And the Winner Is . . . MTSU

ADP leads victory in voter registration contest

By Stephanie Wagner

The tireless work of Honors resident faculty member Mary A. Evins and her team of student and community volunteers has once again registered a success.

MTSU earned its second win as the top four-year public university in Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett’s College Voter Registration Competition. A professor of History, Evins serves as coordinator of the University’s chapter of the American Democracy Project (ADP), which is housed in the Martin Honors Building.

“Consistency, commitment, perseverance, drive, and unwavering dedication got us this win,” Evins said.

The competition, which ran the full month of September, required competitors not only to register the largest number of students to vote but also to launch and manage a creative and unique social media campaign with good engagement, which the secretary’s office tracked.

“ADP students, with help from the Student Government Association on Tuesdays, were register-tovote tabling out on campus not just through the month of September but every day for seven solid weeks, from the first day of class through the last day of Tennessee voter registration before fall break,” Evins said.

“We also worked hard to post MTSU student photos to social media with both the MTSU and secretary office’s voting hashtags.”

Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett with (l-r) Elaf Alkazzaz, Kayla Jenkins, Mary Evins, Jada Powell, Stevie Naumcheff, Victoria Grigsby, and Laura Clark

MTSU volunteers registered 343 students to vote during the month of the competition.

Hargett extended his congratulations to the True Blue campus for its robust efforts. This is the second time MTSU has won as the top four-year public university in the statewide competition.

“Congratulations to all the dedicated Middle Tennessee State University leaders who registered their fellow students and once again earned the top spot in the competition,” Hargett said. “Now more Blue Raiders are ready to cast a ballot and participate in our electoral process.”

Evins emphasized that for MTSU—which also holds voter registration during CUSTOMS orientation—the mission of registering students to vote extends beyond a single month or event.

“MTSU’s objective is serious, larger, and more purposeful,” she said. “Our true achievement objective is to improve upon our own voting record: to better ourselves, to be sure that all MTSU students are registered to vote and registered where she/he/they can get to the polls and vote. We want to elevate our University’s student voting numbers.”

Evins added that voting is democracy and that student voting is the lesson of democracy in action.

“Supporting engaged citizen-scholars is one of MTSU’s primary goals,” she said. “To do everything we can to proactively encourage our students to become the engaged citizens they must be in our participatory democracy is, of course, what we do.

“So, voter registration is important to MTSU, but it’s just a first step. Informed voting is the objective.”