Despite repeated complaints of alleged coercion and possible voter registry fraud over several weeks, the majority of independent voter registration solicitors are still being allowed on campus, school officials said last Monday.
One such complaint is from Stephanie Schwartz, English professor. Schwartz said that Ahande Femi, who is, according to his badge, an independent contractor hired by the Republican affiliated AAV group (Femi refused to identify what AAV stood for in a later interview), attempted to pull forms from her hands to prevent her from marking her affiliation as a Democrat.
“He held up a badge that said Republican on it, and said ‘I’m working for these guys,’ and then added, ‘I gotta get paid!’” Schwartz said.
Femi said that no such event happened, showing the bottoms of two registration forms that had been marked as Democratic in the affiliation section.
“I sign up Democrats, Independents and Republicans. I do them all. I get paid for them all,” Femi said.
Many of these solicitors are from completely unrelated groups, and while the complaints regarding the handling of voter registation are widespread, only single individuals can be held accountable for each complaint, Rebecca Cobb, director of student development, said.
“I’ve even witnessed it (coercion) myself, and I made that person leave campus,” Cobb said.
However, while complaints have been numerous, many of them have been vague and came long after the incident happened, preventing the Student Development office from identifying any transgressors, Cobb said.
“I only have a staff of six people to handle everything,” Cobb said. “There’s nobody to sit out there and monitor solicitors, so we really need people to come in and tell us who is doing this and where they are.”
While school rules require all solicitors to register, some solicitors are showing up on campus completely unauthorized, with absolutely no accountability to the school, Cobb said.
“Part of the issue is that there are authorized people and unauthorized people on campus, and even the ones who come in to fill out the forms for authorization aren’t always the ones actually taking down people’s information on campus,” Cobb said.
Authorized solicitors are required by the college to wear a badge clearly identifying their name, party and group affiliations, Cobb said.
Students need to be wary of any attempts to coerce or alter their registration forms, such as being asked to leave portions of the form incomplete, Schwartz said.
“These guys could just be filling out blank registration forms after a student leaves, getting legitimate names and addresses and then registering them for their party,” Schwartz said.
Students won’t have to worry long about registration solicitors, Femi said.
“After this week I will not be here anymore. After this we will all be going door to door instead,” Femi said.
The last day to register for the Nov. 6 election was yesterday.
-Rigo Bonilla contributed to this story.
