Four days before the football game, UF is already losing to the University of Tennessee.
Outside their athletics programs, the two schools are competing to see who can register the most voters at their respective universities before Oct. 11. The competition is coordinated by UF’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service and Tennessee’s Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy.
The Tennessee center reached out to UF earlier this year to organize the competition. As of Monday, UF is losing to Tennessee with 793 to 1,297 voters registered, respectively.
“(They) thought that they might be able to leverage what is a long-standing tradition of a football rivalry and kind of turn that into a voter registration rivalry,” said Shelby Taylor, the communications director for the Graham Center. She attributed the current standings to UF’s already high registration numbers.
She said the school was hoping that the Graham Center’s high performance in voter registration and voter participation would drive up their registration numbers and motivate students.
“The winning school gets bragging rights and the de facto title of ‘Most Engaged Campus,’” Taylor said, “so really it’s more of a fun and friendly competition.”
Three student organizations, the Graham Center Student Fellows, the Andrew Goodman Foundation’s Vote Everywhere Ambassadors and Chomp the Vote, are working to help register students to vote. Both universities are using TurboVote, an online voting application.
TJ Pyche, the student communications assistant for the Graham Center and president of the Graham Center Student Fellows, says he believes UF students are extremely engaged in registering to vote.
“You can’t walk through campus these days without having somebody ask you if you are registered to vote,” Pyche said. “The students at UF are doing a phenomenal job of making sure they’re engaged in the electoral process.”
The Graham Center has also been spreading the word about the competition on social media and plans to host a voter-registration pizza party in Pugh Hall on Voter Registration Day, which is Sept. 27.
