Registering to vote is usually viewed as a rewarding experience in itself, but voting is another story: You get to experience that warm and fuzzy feeling only democratic participation brings. The candidate of your choice could be elected into office by a margin of a few votes, and you can brag to your friends about how much better you are because you voted and they didn’t.
Oh, and Death Cab for Cutie could play a free show at your school.
This fall, two organizations devoted to voter registration, HeadCount and Why Tuesday? have teamed up with MySpace, MTV’s Declare Yourself and Rock the Vote to create the Ultimate College Bowl, the country’s largest college voter registration drive. Students can enter by visiting the Ultimate College Bowl website and embedding a “widget” into their MySpace profile or another outside site, such as Chooseorlose.com.
Campus groups already involved with on-the-ground registration are also eligible to compete by providing photocopies of their voter registration activities. The school that registers the most students will win a free concert from Death Cab for Cutie, and the school that registers the largest student percentage will win a free acoustic concert from an artist yet to be announced. The top six individual students who register the most voters are eligible to win $10,000 scholarships as well as other prizes.
In a recent phone interview, Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla spoke about the band’s involvement with the Ultimate College Bowl. When presented with the opportunity to get involved with the project, the band was on board right away. The Ultimate College Bowl, according to Walla, felt “tailor-made for a rock band who largely has a great love of our country but mostly dormant interest in politics.” But despite the band’s support of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, Walla dismisses any notion of partisanship behind the effort.
“The whole goal of the Ultimate College Bowl and ultimately us [Death Cab for Cutie] being involved in it is not necessarily about the candidates this time,” he stated. “It’s about getting involved in the process and getting people registered to vote.”
Ultimately, it also comes down to a matter of letting one’s voice be heard politically.
“Sometimes it seems that there aren’t lot of ways for people to actually have a voice and be involved on a day-to-day basis,” Walla says. “But voting is real, like it’s actually one of the things that would get things done.”
Although Death Cab for Cutie has never been an overtly political band lyrically, the band has taken part in voter registration efforts, most notably 2004’s Vote for Change tour. This time around, the difference of enthusiasm from new voters has been obvious.
“When we did the Vote for Change campaign … sometimes it felt like pulling teeth to get people to register to vote,” Walla commented. “I think that it’s much less true for this election. They’re both [Obama and McCain] really polarizing figures, and I think that both campaigns have done a really fantastic job [at] getting people motivated.”
But in Walla’s eyes, voting shouldn’t be limited to just presidential elections. He encourages participation on a local level and hopes that voting in the presidential election will only be the beginning for some students.
“It’s really important, I think, for people to understand and to get connected with the issues in their cities,” he notes.
As an example, Walla discussed how he’d grown up in a neighborhood with no sidewalks. For years, his neighborhood fought to have sidewalks put in and recently got their wish.
“It’s taken a lot of years but you know that’s all … being involved in politics at a local level [is], simple stuff like that. And that’s where it starts.”
