Election Week

This week marks one of the most important times for the American people! The presidential election began on November 3^rd and has been ongoing for the last three days. In most elections, the result is usually known by the end of the night. This time however, it is a very different presidential election than what we are used to. This year, you have people voting in person, voting early, or by mail. Due to this, the election is much different this year. All across the country, people have been anxiously waiting to hear the results over the last couple of days.

Either way it goes, I think we can all agree that the turnout this year has been absolutely incredible! In the 2016 presidential election, we saw about 139 million people vote. This election, over 143 million votes have been counted with projections that that number could go up to about 159 million votes! This would mark a record high number of ballots cast in a presidential election and be the highest voter turnout rate since 1900. I think that this in itself is such a great achievement!

I thought that NMT did a great job of trying to get as many students involved in this discussion. This included holding debate watch parties over zoom and sending occasional emails to the student body where they encouraged students to exercise their right to vote and encourage others to do the same. Students were also encouraged to attend the moderated discussion that began immediately after the debate watch party. This consisted of having an informative and considerate discussion on the issues surrounding the presidential election.

Tech also created a Student Voting Information website where they provided information to students regarding how to register to vote for the first time, the voting options that were available to us during the COVID-19 pandemic, important dates and deadlines, and much more. This year was my first time ever voting and by looking at all of the information that was provided to me on that website I was able to know exactly what I needed to do in order to be ready to vote.

To close this out I thought I would provide a fun fact about the voter turnout in Socorro county. According to the unofficial results provided by the secretary of state, the Socorro county voter turnout was 7,202.

~Vanessa