Running a Mock Election

(CC) freeparking

Here’s an idea for civic educators hoping to bring home the real-life excitement of voting to their students: mock elections.

Particularly useful during the course of ongoing campaigns, you can also hold a mock election any time of the year to focus student energy on the physical process of voting. The National Student/Parent Mock Election organization has created a mock Rhode Island Ballot (.DOC) for you to use in class. (NB: this is not the actual ballot we use here in RI).

Even better, you can also contact the Rhode Island Secretary of State’s office to get an actual voting machine placed in your school to simulate an election. Click here for the SoS website.

While your running yoru mock election, be sure to use it as an opportunity to discuss more than just candidates. The mechanics of voting are also very important (remember those butterfly ballots in Florida in 2000?), and this article from the Boston Globe gives good background on that issue here in Rhode Island:

The infamous recount fight in Florida during the Bush-Gore race in 2000 - butterfly ballots, hanging chads, and a protracted legal dispute decided by the US Supreme Court - prompted the next round of revisions.

Appalled by the partisan wrangling in Florida, Rhode Island lawmakers in 2004 passed laws that keep humans far from the ballot-counting process. The General Assembly eliminated manual vote recounts, relying exclusively on optical scanning machines.

They also enacted a strict new definition of what qualifies as a vote. Unless voters mark their choices by drawing a horizontal line connecting the head and tail of an arrow-like symbol on the ballot, their votes do not count.

Anything else, for example, circling or underlining a candidate’s name, does not qualify as a vote.