{"id":216707,"date":"2021-11-19T14:51:21","date_gmt":"2021-11-19T19:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/?p=216707"},"modified":"2021-11-19T16:03:29","modified_gmt":"2021-11-19T21:03:29","slug":"university-wins-college-ballot-bowl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/2021\/11\/19\/university-wins-college-ballot-bowl\/","title":{"rendered":"University Wins College Ballot Bowl"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Montclair State University won the 2021 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.state.nj.us\/state\/nj-ballot-bowl.shtml\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">New Jersey Ballot Bowl<\/a> in its conference bracket for not only registering students to vote but also for securing 530 pledges to vote from students.<\/p>\n<p>Every election and every vote counts, so this year the New Jersey Department of State added a voting pledge to its annual college Ballot Bowl to encourage students to vote in the November 2 election, which included the governor\u2019s race, 120 state legislative races, hundreds of county and local leaders and, for the first time, early voting was available.<\/p>\n<p>Of the 25 universities that participated in the 2021 Ballot Bowl, the four winners were: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Conference 1: <strong>Montclair State University<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Conference 2: <strong>The College of New Jersey<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Conference 3: <strong>Raritan Valley Community College<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Conference 4: <strong>Berkeley College<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Montclair has won or placed in the Ballot Bowl each of the last few years, according to Brennan Sumner, a graduate student and the graduate coordinator for the Office of Civic and Voter Engagement, who registered or obtained pledges from many students to vote. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe performed exceptionally well not only by the sheer number of students but also by the percentage of the student population who either pledged or registered to vote. I think this speaks well about MSU as an institution and, in particular, the character of its students,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>Some 79% of students are registered to vote, Sumner says, and out of this, 530 pledged to vote in this election. <\/p>\n<p>The Office of Civic and Voter Engagement collaborated with several departments and organizations on the Ballot Bowl, including The Graduate School, the Montclair State Votes Coalition and the Office for Hispanic Initiatives, according to Sumner.<\/p>\n<p>The University has long been a \u201cVoter Friendly Campus\u201d and earned a place on <em>Washington Monthly<\/em>\u2019s list of \u201cBest Colleges for Student Voting\u201d in 2020.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe strongly believe that part of our core responsibility to the State of New Jersey and to the greater community is to help students develop and exercise their rights and responsibilities as citizens,\u201d says Dawn Meza Soufleris, vice president for Student Development and Campus Life. \u201cVoting is the most empowering of those rights, and it is the responsibility of citizens to participate in this type of civic engagement as a way of shaping the world in which they want to live.\u201d <\/p>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\">\n\/\/ Output tags as a list for Google Analytics custom dimension\nwindow.MSU_TagList = [];\n<\/script>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Montclair among universities with most registered student voters who also pledged to vote in the November 2, 2021 election<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":216710,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-homepage-news","category-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216707"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":217249,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216707\/revisions\/217249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/newscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}