As voter registration for the upcoming city election comes to a close Monday, some are questioning the efficiency of Florida’s system.
Students from all over the state will attend UF’s second annual Future of Florida Summit Feb. 20 to 22 to discuss public policy and issues currently facing Floridians, featuring the topic of the online voter registration bill.
The nearly 100 students attending the conference will come up with a plan to support the bill, which will be voted on in the upcoming Florida legislative session, said Frances Chapman, a summit student organizer and UF political science junior.
“This conference is literally building a team of leaders who are getting the best political education, the best political experience they could possibly get,” Chapman, 20, said. “We are building a new type of conference here in the state, and I find that very exciting.”
The students will learn how a bill is advocated, lobbied and passed. Chapman said conference organizers chose to focus on online voter registration because of its bipartisan support.
“We decided that we wanted to come up with something very specific, and something that we felt could actually make some sort of impact here in Florida,” Chapman said.
Michael McDonald, a UF associate professor of political science and a scheduled conference speaker, said 20 states have adopted online voter registration.
Although the Florida bill would not take effect until after the 2016 election, “any progress would be good,” McDonald said.
McDonald wrote in an email that Florida may lack online voter registration because of former Sen. John Thrasher’s opposition and prevention of consideration of the bill in the Senate.
“Politically, legislators often have beliefs about who may benefit from an election reform,” McDonald wrote. “While I do not know what Sen. Thrasher’s thinking, one might presume that he thought Democrats would be advantaged by online registration.”
Katy Burnett, a 32-year-old UF political science and history senior, attended the conference last year and said she looks forward to the changes made in the conference this year.
“The process to implement a new idea is something students don’t know about and the general public doesn’t know about,” Burnett said. “This year is an entirely different ball game.”
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 2/12/2015 under the headline “Student summit aims for online voter registration"]
