On November 5, Leadership hosted a mock vote for Campo students. They had a google form for everyone to vote through and stickers they handed out to students after voting. The goal of the mock vote was to provide an interesting and educational experience for students of all ages.
Akhila Bhagavan, a junior in leadership, helped to set up the voting on November 5. She enjoyed setting up the vote in the library, along with senior ASB president Alex Bruno. Bruno said, “I thought it was really fun.” When asked about the idea behind the mock vote, Bhagavan said, “[it was] to set up an awareness more about voting, especially for young voters as the age that you can pre-register for voting is sixteen years old, and I think our idea was to create more awareness about why voting is important, especially at a young age.” Bruno wanted to show the other parts of the election such as the propositions.
Post mock-election, rumors were spread around Campo about election fraud. When asked about the fraud, Bruno said, “there was definitely some fraud on the google form because we never specified how many times you could vote which kind of goes back to how we would do it differently but we were able to track it pretty easily because you can see whenever we did it there was a bunch of votes in a row in the span of a couple seconds. Obviously we could just take that out. So I think we had a pretty accurate score.” Bhagavan said, “I did hear about the election fraud. I feel like that was something that could have been addressed a lot better. Obviously what we did was try to go through the results…It’s anonymous so we can’t see who fills out the form. But we were able to see if something was suspicious.”
AP and regular US History teacher, Lisa Herzig, when asked if she did anything special for the election, said, “we had for our U.S. Theme[s classes] a three week unit on elections. The election [day] was our final day [of the unit]. And we learned about a number of things, especially how the electoral college works, ballot initiatives, and what’s on the ballot for the state of California.” On the real election day Herzig said “my two US themes class both met. We had a ballot initiative election. So not to compete with what was going on in the library, they voted after presenting on all ten propositions.”
Students who participated were able to gain real life experience with the voting simulation. This provided a unique educational opportunity students may not have been able to have elsewhere.
