Students turn out to vote on campus

Roughly 850 student voters turned up to vote at UW Oshkosh’s in-person polling station in the Nov. 3 election, Oshkosh Student Association co-adviser Missy Burgess told the assembly on Tuesday.

Burgess said that was about half of the votes cast in 2016 in Oshkosh.

“There was a higher percentage of mail-in voting and there’s also a significantly smaller percentage of students living on campus at this point, compared to where we were four years ago,” she said.

Young voters were expected to be an important voting bloc in this election; according to Tisch College’s Youth Electoral Significance Index, Wisconsin’s youth vote was expected to be one of the most influential in the nation, as an estimated 17% of the state’s population is between 18-29 years of age.

From 2012 to 2016, there was a significant shift toward the right among young voters in the state, although President Donald Trump carried the state by less than 1% of the vote.

Trump’s 2016 victory in Wisconsin was the first time a GOP candidate had won the state since 1984; he won by a margin of just over 22,000 votes. Biden’s win in Wisconsin shows the state realigning itself with the last four decades’ trend of support for Democratic candidates. Biden is projected to have carried the state by a margin of just over 20,000 votes.

The Cabinet receives huge donation

The UWO Greek Life community, in conjunction with the food drive, added nearly 3,000 food items to UWO’s campus food pantry, The Cabinet.

“This means there’s a huge amount of variety, and a whole lot of peanut butter if anybody needs some,” Burgess said.

Burgess said peanut butter is one of the hardest things for The Cabinet to secure, so they had asked for it specifically.

The Cabinet, located next to the Titan Underground in Reeve Memorial Union, is open from 9 a..m. – 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Students can also order food online through the OSA’s website if they’d prefer not to wait in person.

OSA Senate passes resolutions

The OSA Senate has passed two resolutions heard in the Assembly last week. One seeks to make each presidential election an academic holiday, affording students ample time to cast their vote.

The resolution, written by OSA vice president pro-tempore Austin Hammond, says voting, being one of the most tangible and simple ways for students to participate in democracy, should be encouraged by the university.

The second resolution puts the OSA’s support behind a petition seeking to restore the blue safety lights around UWO’s campus. Several of the blue lights were installed over two decades ago — meaning they’ve been around longer than much of the student body. As they’ve aged, they’ve become expensive to replace.

In lieu of the blue lights, the UWO Mobile app offers a mobile blue light, as well as other functions such as “Chat with UP,” in which users can keep in constant contact with a dispatcher as they travel throughout campus. But according to OSA chief of staff Patrick Caine, there’s good reason to keep the lights around.

“Obviously there are issues that arise with [the mobile app],” Caine said. “What if your phone goes dead? What if you don’t have a phone?”

Caine and Ava Tryon will be pursuing the petition to save the blue lights from being gradually removed from the UWO campus.