The Muhlenberg community demonstrates high levels of political engagement through robust student voter registration and turnout efforts, the work of a nationally recognized polling institute and a series of election-related events that have been happening every presidential and midterm election year since 1992.
On the evening of September 10, members of BergVotes, a student-run organization whose mission is to raise political awareness and increase civic engagement on campus, arrived in the Red Door Cafe expecting a modest turnout for their presidential debate watch party. The debate fell during recruitment week for the College’s fraternities and sororities, so BergVotes ordered enough popcorn and doughnuts for 30 to 40 students and hoped for the best.
“Come 9 o’clock, the entire Red Door was filled up,” says BergVotes President Kabir Burman ’27, a political science and media & communication double major. “We had people sitting on floors, sitting on the bean bags, sitting on the pool tables. All of the seats, doughnuts and popcorn ran out in five minutes.”
Students attend the BergVotes presidential debate watch party on September 10.Photo by Sierra Addy ’27
The evidence that political engagement at Muhlenberg is high is more than anecdotal: In the last presidential election, 91.6% of Muhlenberg students were registered to vote, and 90.1% of those students cast a ballot. The total student voting rate in 2020 was nearly 83%, one of the highest in the country and well above the national college-student voting rate that year of 66%. Muhlenberg received a platinum seal from the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, which recognizes colleges and universities that achieve excellence in nonpartisan student democratic engagement, for nonpartisan student voter participation efforts in the 2020 election.
And during both presidential and midterm election years, the Department of Political Science organizes an Election Series of speakers, panel discussions and an election postmortem that allows members of the Muhlenberg community to gather and dissect the most recent election results. This tradition of nonpartisan efforts to educate, inform and encourage participation in our democracy reflects the College’s mission, says President Kathleen Harring.
“We couldn’t be more proud of the enduring role Muhlenberg plays in our nation’s civic life,” Harring says. “The College offers many avenues for nonpartisan engagement in an increasingly partisan world. Students learn the importance of participating in our democracy and of relying on data and expert analysis when considering complex issues.”
Ednah Asiema ’26 at a BergVotes/Voter Promoters tabling event in Seegers Union. Photo by Marilyn Rajesh ’26
A Focus on Student Voting
Beth Halpern, the director of Muhlenberg’s Office of Community Engagement (OCE), has prioritized student voting within the office’s mission since she arrived at Muhlenberg in 2007. And while presidential elections get the most media attention (and the most student turnout), the work of the office and its student partners to promote student registration and voting continues through midterm, local and primary elections — all year, every year.
“[Voting is] a fundamental part of our democracy,” Halpern says. “We’re not doing what we need to do as an educational institution if our students aren’t at the very base level participating as they can in our democracy.”
When Halpern arrived, College-wide surveys generally found low levels of voter engagement and turnout, even lower than those of other institutions. The exception to that was in 2008, when scores of students turned out to vote in the presidential election that pitted then-Senator Barack Obama (who had visited the College in March) against then-Senator John McCain. Unfortunately for those students, Muhlenberg’s polling place at the time was at William Allen High School, a mile away, with voters from another precinct. There was a six-hour wait to vote.
For the primaries the following spring, the precinct’s polling location moved to Seegers Union. The political sciencedepartment credits former Vice President of External Affairs and Community Affairs Mike Bruckner for the change; Bruckner says he thinks someone from the political science department led the charge. Regardless, Muhlenberg’s history of involvement in local elections, with students fluent in Spanish serving as interpreters and other students serving as poll workers, likely established a good relationship with the officials who neededto be on board with the change.
Relocating the polling place to Seegers made voting easier, but students still were not generally taking advantage of the proximity: Only 40.6% of Muhlenberg students voted in the 2012 presidential election, which was less than the average of all institutions (49.3%). Former Professor of Political Science Michele Deegan did some research into how to increase turnout among college students and brought ideas to Halpern, who had had several conversations with Deegan about low engagement over the years. Halpern reached out to student leaders from the College Democrats and Republicans, as well as from groups interested in social issues, and organized a meeting for early 2016. The timing was right, and out of that meeting came BergVotes.
[Voting is] a fundamental part of our democracy. We’re not doing what we need to do as an educational institution if our students aren’t at the very base level participating as they can in our democracy.”
—Beth Halpern, Director of Muhlenberg’s Office of Community Engagement
Today, BergVotes and the OCE team of student workers known as the Voter Promoters work closely to encourage students to register to vote, get informed on key issues and make a voting plan. This fall, both groups spent a lot of time at tables near the front doors of Seegers with paper voter registration forms and pens, encouraging students to stop and register. Students who were in a hurry could take a to-go registration packet that included an empty form, a pamphlet with instructions on how to fill it out and a sheet with deadlines, identification requirements and other crucial information.
“Obviously, if students want to [register to vote] online, they’re always welcome to do so, but we’re really trying to make sure students have the option to do it offline, because if they do it on paper, the OCE can provide them with voting-related resources,” Burman says. “Just in case anything goes wrong, the OCE can point that out and help the students rectify it.”
Once the deadline to register to vote had passed (on October 21 in Pennsylvania), the groups shifted toward ensuring students had a plan to cast their ballots. BergVotes led a #WhyWeVote campaign on social media to encourage students to share why they had registered and what their plan was for following through with voting. The ultimate goal is to increase the turnout rate of registered voters to 92% (up from 90% in 2020).
At press time, BergVotes and Voter Promoters were also planning to team up to prepare an Issues Expo for Monday, November 4, the day before Election Day. The two groups were inviting other student groups associated with specific issues to present information about those issues and candidates’ positions on them. For example, in previous iterations of the Issues Expo, student journalists from The Muhlenberg Weekly have spoken about freedom of the press and journalists’ rights.
“It’s important for [BergVotes and Voter Promoters] to pool our resources and manpower together because we both have basically the same goals,” says Alexandra Downey ’27, an English & creative writing and media & communication double major who is the team lead for Voter Promoters. “We want that voter turnout. We want people registered and informed.”
Professor of Political Science and MCIPO Director Christopher Borick teaching Public Health Policy in spring 2023. Photo by Lisa Helfert
A Tradition of Trusted Polling
Muhlenberg becomes a source of information to communities well beyond campus through the MCIPO, which has evolved considerably since its launch in 2001. It got its start on the lower level of Trexler Library, where student workers would make phone calls, log responses and do some data analysis. Now that the institute is housed in the Fahy Commons for Public Engagement and Innovation, the call center is gone and the data collection is outsourced to a trusted vendor. This means that student workers, all of whom are political science majors or minors, have more opportunities to work with the data: digging in to look for trends or surprising data points, utilizing statistical software and writing up their analyses.
“It gives [students] the opportunity to see how they can endeavor to answer research questions in political science,” says Burt, who works closely with the students and Borick to produce the reports MCIPO publishes. “They can see a really practical application of the things we discuss in the classroom and think about what the implications might be on election outcomes and how the public is interpreting events. They appreciate the opportunity for their analysis to be taken seriously.”
Seeing [Muhlenberg’s] name out there in [the media] helps Muhlenberg in terms of its relevance in major discourse that’s going on in the world. [Muhlenberg is] a place that values its role in helping students to think and to be engaged in such discourse.”
—Christopher Borick, Director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion and Professor of Political Science
This has been the experience of Adam Stone ’25, a history major and political science minor who is working at the MCIPO for a second consecutive year. “We are always working with really interesting data sets that tell so many different stories at the same time,” Stone says. “Having the chance to look at the data and make my own inferences of what it means and all of the implications that come with that is a very exciting opportunity. Doing work here during election season — especially in such an electorally important state like Pennsylvania — only makes the data more pressing and therefore meaningful.”
Indeed, an election year, and a presidential election year in particular, is especially frenzied for the MCIPO, given its location and its history of transparency and accuracy, which has bolstered its reputation. Its first Pennsylvania statewide survey since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, which was released in late September, found a 48% to 48% tie between Harris and Republican nominee former President Donald Trump. That survey was covered in The New York Times, Newsweek, the New York Post and other national and local outlets. At press time, another statewide survey was set to go live in late October.
“Seeing [Muhlenberg’s] name out there in [the media] helps Muhlenberg in terms of its relevance in major discourse that’s going on in the world,” says Borick, who estimates he gives about 700 interviews in a typical election year. It shows that Muhlenberg is “a place that values its role in helping students to think and to be engaged in such discourse. When a student or a parent or an alum sees Muhlenberg in a national article or an international article or an international show, it’s a symbol of what we do at Muhlenberg.”
Muhlenberg students will be also conducting exit polling on Election Day as part of a statewide initiative among a handful of Pennsylvania institutions with polling centers. But election-related work is only part of what the MCIPO does: It conducts regular polls on environmental and public health issues and also collaborates with community partners (including school districts, municipalities and local health networks) to gather and analyze information that’s beneficial to them.
“Everybody loves a horse-race poll, to see who’s up and who’s down; I understand that. It has its own role,” Borick says. “The surveys that have given me the most pleasure are our studies that look at policy and issues. That’s where I think the most valuable aspects of our research can be found.”
[Students] can see a really practical application of the things we discuss in the classroom and think about what the implications might be on election outcomes and how the public is interpreting events.”
—Lindsay Burt, Managing Director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion and Assistant Professor of Political Science
Jason Metz ’23 in Public Health Policy in spring 2023. The MCIPO routinely conducts research related to public health issues.Photo by Lisa Helfert
Opportunities to Consider Timely Issues
Another avenue by which Muhlenberg has educated campus as well as the broader community about election-related issues is the Election Series, which has been held every other year since 1992. This year’s organizer, Associate Professor of Political Science Ross Dardani, enjoyed the “great excuse to be able to invite people who are doing really important work on issues that really matter.”
One especially timely guest this year was SNF Agora Institute Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University Lilliana Mason, who gave a talk on the rise of political polarization and political violence. Mason is “one of the preeminent academic scholars on the causes of the rise in political violence in contemporary American politics,” Dardani says. While this year’s assassination attempts — the most serious targeting of a president or presidential candidate since 1981 — illustrate the timeliness of her work, it’s not as if the issue of political violence will become irrelevant after the election. The opportunity to consider the long-term implications of issues that matter now is a key part of Election Series programming.
Geraldo Cadava, an associate professor of history and Latina and Latino studies at Northwestern University, spoke about the Latinovote in 2024 andbeyond as part of the Election Series. Photo by Reesa Malish ’28
Because the Election Series, like so much other political engagement work at Muhlenberg, is nonpartisan, the purpose is for experts to present data, evidence and analysis in order to encourage the audience to think critically about an issue. This will hopefully inform the choices they make as voters and engaged citizens and inspire them to participate in our democracy.
“It’s a really good opportunity for students and members of the local community to be able to engage with a wide range of speakers — from academics to election workers to judges to people who are doing advocacy work,” Dardani says. “The whole point is to allow for critical engagement and critical thinking about relevant issues in this particular election.”
