I'm 20 years old and I've never voted. While statistically that may put me in the majority, I find it rather shocking.
As a child I anxiously awaited election days and proudly wore my mother's "I voted" sticker. Before computers made calendaring the future fairly simple, I drew out 20 years worth of calendars by hand so I'd know the date of the first election in which I was eligible to vote (I was strange, alright?). In high school I was president of the Young Democrats, and I spent my fall weekends knocking on doors and stuffing mailboxes. Yet somehow, my first two elections came and went without excitement, and my disillusion with electoral politics and the Democratic Party is only partially responsible for the fact that I voted in neither.
They were local elections, but that is not an excuse. Controlling local policy, including school and community boards, is perhaps one of the few levels on which people can have direct control over the political process and one of the few arenas in which mobilized citizens can demand and create change. Cities around the country passed anti-war resolutions when Congress was keeping its mouth shut; city mayors have been among the only public officials to stand up to the rather absurd movement against gay marriage. In fact, local elections involve so much more direct accountability, and so much more possibility for successful grassroots organizing that they are the only thing that makes me see the electoral system as at all redeemable. This is precisely why I didn't vote.
I firmly believe in local politics as a means of holding politicians and the electoral process accountable to communities. I'm simply not sure I believe that New York City school and community board members and state representatives ought to be held accountable to me, on the basis that I attend Columbia.
I completely understand why college students are allowed to vote in the state where they attend school. I get angry every time a television talking head claims that the youth vote is not an issue in the upcoming presidential election; this anger is a reaction to both the dismissal of the young people who do vote and the erroneous assumption that not voting is automatically an act of apathy. Perhaps if people our age voted in the same numbers as the elderly, courting our votes would involve politicians doing more than reciting their favorite hip-hop lyrics. If letting students vote where they go to school works toward that, it's a good first step.
That said, as much as I love New York City, I "live" here only in the most fleeting sense. I have never paid taxes here; I didn't go to school here; I don't have children who will be going to school here in the near future. And while theoretically I am still subject to any number of laws and regulations affected by local elections, the truth is I live in an elite gated community and that privilege, undermined as it might be by the fact that I'm young, black, and female is in some sense insulating. To the extent that I live in the "community" of "Morningside Heights," it's a community that Columbia already has too much control over--to the point that my voting as a member of this community would in some ways be a subversion of the direct democracy that local elections ought to make possible. I didn't vote at home for similar reasons--college is the longest I've had the same address, and I felt odd voting in a neighborhood in which I had never actually "lived," and in all likelihood never would.
Perhaps it's silly to let a philosophical objection interfere with what pragmatically would be a positive outcome. My own logic reminds me of a classmate's response to my urging that he get involved in the movement to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws. When I brought up New York State's harsh mandatory minimum sentences, he replied, "I don't live in New York, I live in the People's Republic of Columbia." At the time it seemed like a short-sighted and ultimately lazy perspective, but my long explanation may amount to the same thing. I could have done more to make myself a citizen of New York, instead of letting this campus be the focal point of my political involvement.
Given that my transience shows no sign of ending anytime soon, I'm going to have to think seriously about what it means to be a member of a community. I will vote for the first time this year, in my first presidential election (My vote will be a write-in for none of the above, but that's a whole other column).
I do, however, believe that the missed opportunity was not on my part alone. Columbia may be "in the City of New York," but it does its part to encourage the "People's Republic of Columbia" mentality, to the point that even its attempts to encourage students to engage with the community through service fall victim to a kind of benevolent paternalism that makes divisions deeper, rather than lessening them. The most important political work doesn't involve simply voting at "home," or not voting at all, but radically changing Columbia's relationship with the neighborhoods surrounding it, through personal involvements with the city and challenges to the most local administration of all, that of Columbia University.
Danielle Evans is a Columbia College senior majoring in anthropology. This is her last column before she graduates in May.