The Tempe City Council announced Thursday it will move forward with plans to open an early-voting polling location on the Tempe campus.
The Undergraduate Student Government presented the proposal at the council’s weekly meeting Thursday night.
The polling place would be in Palo Verde Main on North campus. It would be funded by the student program facility fee and open to all Tempe residents.
Sarah Aagard, USG local affairs director, said an on-campus polling place would benefit both students and the community at large. A polling place on ASU’s largest campus would make the option of voting in elections at all levels more convenient for students and residents of the surrounding community, she said.
“Getting an early polling location on campus [is] a really good way to engage students and make them lifelong voters,” Aagard said. “But we also want to make voting accessible to Tempe as a whole because there’s never been an accessible site in west Tempe.”
Currently, the closest polling location to the Tempe campus is at the city library, located near South Rural Road and East Southern Avenue.
Student leaders said that location is inaccessible to residents because it serves such a large portion of the community.
“In the past, the Tempe library has been overcrowded,” Aagard said.
“That has made it even more difficult for North Tempe residents because they have to take a lot of time out of their schedules [to vote].”
If the new polling site is approved, students will get their first opportunity to use it in the spring, when the city of Tempe holds city council elections. The elections should be of great interest to students because of the impact that decisions at city hall have on their everyday lives, she said.
“Local government is the best way to affect change in your day-to-day life. Things like the Orbit buses and a lot of everyday concerns are addressed at the local level,” Aagard said.
If successful, it could be used as an early-voting polling site in future state and national elections, she said.
Aagard joined Rudi O’Keefe Zelman, USG vice president of policy, and Jordan Jacobson, USG director of voter outreach, in addressing the council during the meeting.
Global studies senior Ben Wood-Isenberg, who also addressed the council, talked about how difficult it was to make it to the polls at the library while dealing with a busy class schedule.
“Last year, I waited about four hours,” Wood-Isenberg said. “It’s a very complicated process.”
Overall, the idea was met with approval from council members, but Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman had some reservations about the idea. Hallman said he is uncomfortable with the idea that a large organization, such as the University, can pay for a polling place convenient to its own members.
“The issue that we now have to address is that it’s now acceptable to pay for a polling place convenient to your voters,” Hallman said. “Why shouldn’t Motorola … also be allowed to come forward to this city and say, ‘We like our employees so much we’re going to buy them a poll?’ ”
The polling location would be advertised and available to the community at large, O’Keefe-Zelman said. Outreach efforts would include parking spaces in the nearby Fulton parking structure set aside for resident voters and transportation from community centers to the polling location, O’Keefe-Zelman said.
“This [polling] location isn’t just for students. We have about 50,000 students and only 10,000 live in Tempe. This is for the entire community,” O’Keefe-Zelman said.
Hallman said he is still in favor of the proposal, but added that he wants to make sure USG advertises the polling station to the entire community, not just University students, ensuring USG is providing it as a public service and not as a means of furthering its own interests.
“While I support this going forward, I am going to be watching closely,” Hallman said. “We have to be absolutely fair in who we’re targeting to get out to vote.”
Reach the reporter at derek.quizon@asu.edu.
