Voting for who in the what now?

Primary elections were held Monday at locations across DeKalb, though some students seemed blissfully unaware of the situation as many voting stations saw a meager turn out.

“It’s been very slow,” said election judge Judy Griswold. “Students tend not to vote in the primaries. We probably won’t have seen 40 people by the end of the day.”

Griswold may be correct. With the polls open until 7 p.m. Monday, the polling station at the Campus Recreation Center saw 28 voters with an hour before closing.

Some students chose not to vote in the primary elections because they either didn’t know the candidates or were unwilling to declare their party.

“I don’t know that much about the election,” said freshman geology major Elise Swan. “I don’t have a TV so I don’t really know what is going on. I would feel kind of bad if I voted for someone I didn’t know anything about.”

Swan is not alone in her cluelessness. Griswold said many people, both students and non-students, tend to feel uninformed about the candidates, so they choose not to vote at all.

“It’s not unusual [to have a low turnout],” Griswold said. “Primaries tend to have fewer voters, especially in the student section. Rather than vote for someone they don’t know, people just don’t vote at all.”

The primaries are about electing the best person from a party to run for office. A voter has to declare which party he or she belongs to. It is a declaration many students feel uncomfortable with, thus deterring them from voting.

“A lot of the time we have students ask why they have to declare a party,” Griswold said. “We try to explain it to them as best we can. [In the primaries] you can’t cross parties so you have to decide which one is most important to you.”