As Virginia local elections approach, an important demographic will reemerge: newly eligible voters, including many students at PA who have recently turned 18. PA seniors Trevor Darr and Jacob Long set out to ensure that people their age were able to access the information they need to make an informed decision before casting a vote.
The Polling Place is a non-profit organization, founded in August of 2020, ahead of the year’s presidential election, run by students across the country and based in Arizona. The organization covers elections in California, Arizona, Texas, Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia, with a main focus on local elections.
Senior Trevor Darr, the director of the Hampton Roads Polling Place chapter, says that the “opportunity to do real political research” motivated him to get involved in the organization.
Members like Darr spend hours researching, fact-checking, and updating pages on the organization’s website, regarding a wide variety of topics, from ballot locations to the candidates running for office. Darr explains his main focus has been on the social outreach of the organization. “Most of my responsibilities trace back to my larger duties as Virginia social media and outreach director,” Darr describes. ”It’s my job to recruit as many people to the organization and gain as large of an audience as possible given the scale of our work.”
Darr describes his largest project with the organization as “coordinating the research of over 56 candidates in local races in less than a week,” a process that he says took hours to complete due to the extensive nature of creating candidate profiles that accurately and objectively reflect a politician’s education, beliefs, and plans if they are elected.
Senior Jacob Long, another PA student working with The Polling Place, describes his own experience, saying “the work I have done for The Polling Place has mainly been researching and creating profiles [of candidates] running for the Virginia General Assembly from the Hampton Roads area. I have compiled information from multiple sources to create accurate profiles that will hopefully be useful this election cycle in helping voters determine which candidate more aligns with their views.”
Many of the candidates who appear on The Polling Place website are non-partisan, running for local offices in which they would represent small amounts of people. According to Darr, the biggest problem in current politics is “the skepticism towards the possibility that candidates represent people and not extremities of larger parties or lobbying organizations.”
For the millions of people who become eligible to vote every year, the voting process can be thought of as difficult and confusing. According to The Polling Place website, the lack of clear information can lead to a decrease in voter turnout, and keep Americans from fulfilling their civic duty of participating in democratic processes. “Sometimes all the information that is available [of a candidate] is an attack ad on TV,” explains Long. “Making it easy to learn about the candidate will hopefully make all voters more active.”
To view The Polling Place’s website, click here
