 Alright, so we're back again. This is now the fourth time that I've tried to get this Instagram live to work. The connection is a bit choppy right now. So if you saw earlier, my name is Catty Genuzzi and I'm going to be interviewing James Todesco. Hopefully the connection works better this time. James is the president of UVM votes, so we have a lot of great questions lined up for him. Just waiting for him to join. There, that's so much better. That's so much better. Alright, awesome. Thank God. I know it's been, I feel like we've just been completely unable to meet. Yeah, that's very fair. Yeah. Alright, well, it's nice to meet you. Do you want to start off by introducing yourself? Yeah. My name is James Todesco. I'm a junior at the University of Vermont. I was born and raised in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and I am a political science and French double major here. Awesome. That's really cool. I love polycycler classes at UVM. There were some of my favorite ones. So, yeah. Alright, so let's start talking about your political experiences. So when did you become politically active? I know you said that you were born and raised in Vermont, so I'm curious to know. Yeah, my first experience with the political system was in eighth grade. I was a legislative page at our state house, and so I think the legislative page system is where like some 30-odd Vermont students in their eighth grade year work in the state legislature during their spring semester, and you do it for a month and a half, and you go do an entire work week in the state house being a courier for notes and doing like other little secretarial work for the house and the Senate chambers, and then on Mondays, you go to school, you collect your score, you take it with you to the state house, and then in your free time, you finish your work there. And that was an interesting window into the local political process. And from there, in high school, I did debate, which was removed from the concrete experience of local politics or like any political agenda per se, but it was deeply engaged with policy issues. And so in Vermont, you do this thing called public forum where you research a topic for one month and you come to understand it really well, and you debated a couple of times. And in college, that kind of all came together when I had gotten a better understanding about policy research and further enabled by my polycyc classes, and I worked with Rebecca Holcomb's governorial campaign this past summer. She was the former secretary of education in Vermont, and I think a very compassionate leader. One by a landslide, but it was a pleasure to phone bank and do campaign finance for her. And then ultimately following my interning with her campaign, I founded a group called UVM votes. And it was in founding that group that we really got to like dig into the specific issue of student voting rights, which once you find like a nice niche, and that can become your niche, I feel like that's that's pretty satisfying and was a very new experience for me. So it's been it's been a real adventure. And I've been doing that since this past, really intensely since this past fall, though we did begin doing like a little bit of stuff in the spring before COVID. Wow. So you really kind of got started when you were in eighth grade, which is crazy to think you were like 12 years old. And it was just something that, you know, obviously, you just had a passion for. So it's really interesting to hear about how that's like blossomed into what it has become today and UVM votes. And I'm really curious to know about that. So can you just tell me a little bit about that, what the goals of the club are? Yeah, just I just want I want to hear about it. And how does someone go about joining that if there's, you know, in the future? Yeah, the goals of the goal of UVM votes is primarily centered around this idea of institutionalizing resources. So right before a campaign, what you'll find us and every other like activist organization doing right before an election is there will be lots of tabling. There will be a lot of door knocking and these measures make a lot of sense. They've happened for as long as campaigns have been an option, but they take they take the same amount of intense effort year and year again. And so what you really interested in as a group is how can we make resources a staple of a process which people already traveled. So in the state of Vermont and many other states around the US, there's this thing called voter. It's when you it's when you're registered to vote by registering your car or like going to have your license updated. So when you go to the DMV. Yeah. Despite the incredible alliteration there are like assets. But yeah, and so that makes a lot of sense. It's a pathway people already travel and it's not related to voting, but it helps promote voter registration. And so in the way that states have historically been laboratories for democracy. I also hold that college campuses in the modern day are small laboratories for democracy because we're functionally small municipalities. And we have our own rule systems that encourage or curb certain behaviors. And so that's like the abstract overview of what the group is interested in. In material terms, it looks like things such as integrating voter registration into the my UVM portal or using the registrar's office to tech students once or twice a year to say like hey registered to vote through this link and then link to UVM's turbo vote page, which is a voter registration tool. Or maybe you could have a like you could have UVM declare like a campus holiday for going like out to election day in the same way we have town meeting day off. Right. So basically UVM votes what I'm hearing about it. I mean there's so many, you know, details as into, you know, how this how this group, you know, functions on a daily basis. But something that I'm just really pulling from it is that the goal is to make voter registration and voting among college students as like accessible as possible. And, you know, with an emphasis on how important it is that you know I've learned this through my other interviews to that I've done for this page that, you know, college student turnout when they're voting is extremely important because we do make up as college students the big part of the community. So it's super important to be able to, you know, get out there and, you know, register in our area and make a difference with our votes. So I totally appreciate what UVM votes is doing. So when did you when did you start the club? We originally started as an offshoot of a national organization called every vote counts national, which was that Yale has a very similar mission and organization. But after the spring semester of 2019, like COVID hit things slowed down, and it was in the fall of, oh sorry, spring of 2020, spring of 2019 is a little too far ago. But in the fall of 2020, just barely right before the fall semester began, I just something I was I was fishing in Montana, I was fly fishing. I'm a vegetarian so anecdotally, I just throw the fish back, but and I just got to thinking about UVM and student voter turnout. And I looked into some data that Tufts University organizes through their Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, and it's a service they provide for free to any university that requests it. And what they do is they analyze how much your student body is participating in the voting process and they break it, they can aggregate this or disaggregate it by race, ethnicity, gender, year you are what you age you are. And also, and then in this coming cycle they're going to tell you about in state and out of state. But what it revealed to me once I requested it and encountered it was that UVM students are voting below the national average of college students. So not only do students vote at a substantially lower rate to the tune of 20% below the national average citizen in the US, but then UVM votes below the collegiate national average by three to five points. That's really surprising. Yeah, that's really surprising. So this is actually going directly into that's a really great segue into the next question that I have. How has UVM votes affected voter turnout to your knowledge, among college students. It's, it's one of those tough things it feels like shouting into the void. I, I know we've had a lot of contact with students that much we know in a quantitative fashion in the fall semester, because we didn't have time to step back take a breath, assess what institutional measures could be implemented, because that necessarily takes often more than a year. We were just like running with a relational tax banking strategy and text banking takes your traditional text banking where you text any number you can get a hold of a step further where you text the numbers of the people you already have in your phone. And the thinking behind this is by having a pre existing relationship with people you're more likely to motivate change. Right. We reached out to, I think about 600 UVM students. Wow. But we don't have like a way to know what percent of those students were already registered and how many of them fully followed through on registering. But we've also, we did tabling, which I have learned is not the most effective way to engage with people certainly not during COVID times. So digital fashions of accessing people has been particularly important. And we've also grown our Instagram presence, which we're always still working on, as I think everyone is. So I don't know exactly how much of a difference we materially made. And I think that's also some of why I feel so invested in working on institutional changes, because institutional changes at least you know you've made some concrete advancement. Whereas each cycle when you're trying to register voters and you're not putting the paperwork in their hands, which is increasingly less and less effective. You don't really know if that person followed through all the way and it doesn't seem the best way to deliver them increased accessibility. I'm curious to know how the, how the statistics have changed from what you were saying about, you know, how UVM was below the collegiate average of people who vote. I'm curious to know how that's changed even within the past year. I know that, you know, you really got up and going with UVM votes, you know, it's been a little less than a year or about a year. And I'm curious to know how the statistics will like continue to shift in that over the upcoming years as UVM votes, you know, more students get involved in it and it becomes, you know, a bigger thing on campus. So I think that'll be really interesting. We'll have access to the data for this past general election cycle come June. It's a little later than usually the data is available in May, but because of the extreme number of mail-in ballots, it'll take longer. And I also forgot to mention one of the really effective things that we did last semester was we sent one email out through the Student Government Association. And we used link tracking on that email to see how many clicks through to UVM's voter registration portal happened. We got 170 clicks. And I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that those people who took the initiative to click through to the voter registration portal probably investigated that process through to its end. And for some of those people, it might have been updating their voter registration status. Some of them just want to be extra cautious. Maybe there's, you know, a kind of self-sample bias where people who really care about voting want to like double down on being sure that they're registered. I tell myself optimistically before I go to sleep that we registered some new people through that path. I definitely believe you did, especially, you know, with the recent election, the presidential election. I mean, I was seeing every day on Instagram, you know, at least 10 to 15 to 20 posts, stories, you know, encouraging people to register to vote. And, you know, it was just something that I feel like at a certain point, I mean, I was registered already. But I believe that it definitely encouraged a lot more people to vote that maybe weren't registered before. So I think that you're definitely what's what you're doing is definitely going to bring in some new registration. And yeah, and Peter just said in the chat, he said, thanks for all the work you're doing to increase voter turnout. So I agree with that. I know you know Peter a little bit. All right, so what strategies on election days are you using to ensure that UVM students are voting? Yeah. So other than the fact we're primarily interested in like the super zoomed out multi year approach when it comes down to it when we're looking at those like the day of the election, maybe the three days preceding the election. What did this past semester was we looked at the Tufts analysis, and we found out which majors were voting at the lowest rate. And then we expected by specifically targeting those majors and encouraging them to turn out to vote. We could have the most impact possible. So what we did is we contacted professors in stem who taught stem classes and we said, hey, may we present in front of your class. And so myself and other people on UVM votes team went to those classes. And we just gave like a 60 second talk about voting it like voting rules for college students, which is it's kind of misunderstood but you can vote in the state where you are from, or the 10 school which is a really potent problem for UVM students are an important question because we are an 80% 7380% out of state student population. And then we talked about voting in the upcoming election locally and why that might be an easier path for most students because of how good the voter registration laws in Vermont are. And then finally, we said if you show up, we are tabling in front of the polling place and we have cookies, we have drinks, we have coffee, and we got like, we brought in like, yeah, girls and that's how and then people showed up. I don't know some of them from the stem classes. I don't know specifically how many from the stem classes, but that's where we were. So stem was the major that had the least amount of voter turnout them. I think business majors also had very low voter turnout. It's an interesting question which I'm not sure I've gotten all the way to the bottom of, but because one of the problems for registering college students to vote is the fact that you have cohort turnover right every four years. Yeah, when we look at general election data for which majors are turning out to vote. That's a whole cycle ago. So even though by concrete hard absolute numbers, it might have been a significant data point to look at when we think about who we want like what majors we want to target which what majors we see as particularly low turnout in whatever our current moment is. I think it makes more sense to look back at the most recent election rather than the most recent matching election. So the matching election is like, this was a general we'd look back to 2016. That might not be as meaningful representation as looking back to the 2018 midterms and then seeing in a relative terms who showed up. Anyway, that that was. Is it accurate to assume that political science majors are among the group people who vote the most or have the higher voter turnout. Or do you remember which major. I think education majors turned out at a really high rate. Let's see we can see it at UVM. I have all the links memorized. I think UVM. I'm going to say general election. I'm not hosting it there anymore. Well, I think I remember seeing education majors. I think policy majors were middle of the pack. I was not extraordinarily proud of policy majors at the time. I think they got grouped into humanities. Because Tufts is trying to do a comparative analysis, not only for your school, but for hundreds of universities across the country, they just need to lump some majors together in the categories that can compare. And so I didn't discover a policy category and I suspect we got like either social sciences or humanities and those above average rates, but I think education and maybe like social services probably took the cup. Wow, that's really interesting. All right, so this question is the one that we chatted about briefly before we got started with the interview, but so Burlington's ward eight is notoriously jet gerrymandered gerrymandered. So how does UVM UVM votes impact the word and other words in the city. Yeah, so to recap gerrymandering. Yeah, for folks at home gerrymandering is when you draw district lines with the intention of over representing a particular group. And so historically this has happened in the south to disadvantage black voters and advantage white voters. And it involves making sure that whatever group you're interested in always holds just barely a majority in the district, or it tends to look like just barely holding majority in a district. In Vermont, we've gerrymandered a student district, and we've done it in what I think is not such an a farious way. So what we've done is we've tried to with as as much clarity as possible just make sure students are the only people in this district. It looks like a lot of residential living. And it looks like some of the student housing behind the Waterman building and granted there are some local residents of Vermont who also fell into this category. But the reason why it's an advantageous thing, or it could be argued it's an advantageous thing in our context is because students have a hard time engaging in the political process. That's what this whole conversation is in part because they're new to it in part because they're transient members of the community. So it's hard for them to create organizing coalitions and generate political force with that. And so that's why it might be argued as advantageous. How does UVM votes impact that? Well, we focus on we focus on interacting exclusively with students were interested in improving the voter experience of students at UVM. And so our our goal is to increase turnout there. What we saw in the last mayoral election, which might be a good finger on the pulse of local student turnout in those in that gerrymandered student district Ward 8 is we saw only 20% turnout. Like maybe 22% 20% and that in the context of the other wards in Burlington. I think there are eight words total. Yeah, put it at like 45 to 50, 55%. And so we are we are still way below the mark. Yeah. Wow, that's that's really interesting. And I know we got some some love on that question and like the comments and then the hearts on the side. So I think that that's that question was something I didn't I didn't come up with this question someone else on my team did. And I thought that was a really, really interesting, really interesting question again something that I said in one of the introductions of the this live that I tried to start so many times that we have some really good questions, especially some that, you know, we might not immediately about, you know, as students who are unaware of this, you know, this issue. So, you know, I recently learned about it. And, you know, I think it's something that's obviously really important to be aware of, you know, especially with how low the voter turnout is compared to other words, like, almost half of it. Yeah. All right, the next question sorry I'm reading off of my laptop right now just so I don't miss any of them because they have a bunch of good ones. So SGA elections are run on strict budgets for each candidate. What problems would arise if candidates could spend an unlimited amount of money on their campaign. Oh, and I wanted to know when you're curious about this question are you curious about SGA candidates who could spend unlimited amount or like actual like general election. Yeah. So, let's, let's talk about SGA candidates. Okay. Yeah. I thought this was such a fun question, or at least an interesting one given a million dollars like what would you do with it kind of. Yeah, I was thinking the SGA is unlikely to attract super PACs, which are big donating coalitions, such as we find in our current political system. But the consequences I think we discover if we afforded SGA candidates to run without budget caps is we we'd see some resemblance of what we see in our current political system, which is most of the time, even if there are some exceptions to the rule, there would still be the rule where most of the time we see the most advantaged and affluent students rise to the top because they can leverage intense social media campaigns. Social media campaigns, although they can be driven by followerships, they can also be driven by sponsored posts. And they can also be driven by dropping like geo filters over locations through services like Snapchat or Instagram and you pay for those. Usually, and that that would create a system where not only does it mean those candidates are unresponsive to the general student body, but it also means that in an additional harm, maybe related to that one, definitely related to that one, you see the needs of less advantaged students ever represented. So you see it taken in a direction that maybe has like maybe funding for the from the SGA suddenly starts going to more superficial elements of our university. Whereas there might be like a big need for like redoing one of the residence halls. But and on campus like every year of their time at UVM, they're a senior, they know the residence halls are bad. But someone who lives off campus because they have the money to live off campus and they have the money to pay for a political campaign through the SGA is really detached from that problem. Yeah. No, it's it's and we see this also in which is why I know you asked, you know, are we talking SGA or are we talking, you know, real world kind of politics like that because that's this is definitely something that's been seen and, you know, other campaigns for politicians that, you know, when they have, you know, an insane amount of money to spend on their campaigns, it really detaches the candidate from the from the voters and, you know, the people that they're attempting to represent in any way. So, yeah. So, how can the importance of voting be integrated in UVM fall curriculum. In your opinion. Yeah. Really great question to this is a great question. And I really like the focus on making things integrated versus additive. I think, I think additive is like someone gives a talk once in your class for 60 seconds. Right. And I don't want to totally diminish that because I think that's like I don't want to say, I want to acknowledge that some movement forward is better than no movement forward and sometimes it looks like additive. But if an integrative approach to me, for example, would look like having your professors on more than one occasion, probably three occasions, bring up registering to vote in the fall, not all at once, but over a period of time. And that period of time is so important because you don't bludgeon students with the same information again and again, make it turn that information into small consumable steps. So say like, the first thing is like, think about, do you know what state you want to vote in? That has nothing to do with the logistics that just has to do with what you believe. Where do you care about voting? If it's here, if it's somewhere else, okay, now you know. The next time professor talks to you maybe a week later, say, investigate steps registered to vote in that place. And then the third step might be like another week later, and it could be like, has anyone had problems and maybe do a little bit of troubleshooting. It might not be a fair burden to salad professors with, but if you can get students to consider whether they've had trouble, then that professor can redirect maybe to an organization like UVM votes, maybe to an organization like our Office of Civic Engagement, which has recently really begun to take on a flavor for civic activism in the voting political sense. So that's a favorite idea of mine. It's important though that we can't like rush to believing that professors can say like, oh, you get extra credit or maybe you won't pass my class if you don't register to vote because that, my friends, is a felony. Yeah. No one's interested in that. So you can't have an exchange of goods or services and a grade would be like a sort of service. And you can't withhold or provide goods or services on account of someone's registering to vote or in fact voting, but you can certainly carve pathways for people to travel more easily. That's definitely my favorite one. Yeah, I also think that it's really important to, you know, instead of obviously, obviously, including adding, you know, resources to register to vote also educating students on, you know, their right to vote in a state that they might not you know, that they might not live in like they just go to school and because I know that a lot of UVM students don't vote because they don't realize that they can. And so I think that having that force of, you know, some education within classes would definitely help, you know, bring up some voter turnout and that would also be, you know, an easy thing to include within fall curriculum. It's just reminding of their, of their right to vote in the state. The residency of students is such an interesting constitutional question. And for anyone interested in investigating this further, you can find really intriguing parallels to soldiers as voters because soldiers often have this transient residential status and they can't often meet a durational requirement. The soldier situation is very easy to imagine. You can imagine you turn 18, you immediately enlist in the army, and you move out of your hometown, but you're not living in any of the places you're stationed. And say like every move to a new place, why should you be expected to vote in the last place you had some like planted address. So that's kind of something is on my mind. Yeah, that's a really, that's really interesting. And again, the other things that, you know, in myself, I haven't given much thought to so being able to discuss this and learn about it and talk about it is very valuable. So that's, that's really cool. So how important is the role of social media in regards to voter turnout at UVM and does social media play a big role in UVM votes as mission. I think social media plays a big part. I don't know if it, I wish UVM votes could leverage social media with some more strength. But I think when you see your peers posting about voting, I think that's a really powerful signaling mechanism. I think when really popular Instagram pages on the student community post about voting, even if that is in no way their central cause. I think that's really powerful because you can kind of, you can briefly leverage that audience which otherwise was not like intending to receive it. And I think that's really meaningful and kind of explores an opportunity to collaborate like collaboration collaborations don't need to be lengthy or really energy consuming to still be valuable. And so that's what I think it looks like in the general UVM community. What it the kind of role it plays for UVM votes, I would say is a little bit of a smaller role. And we actually just switched from a social media chair to an engagement chair for reasons that have to do with the broadness of the vision. So I think it makes sense to have someone who actually specializes in content curation. That's like understanding how design tools work. That's understanding how social media platforms work because you engage audiences differently based on the mode of communication. So we switched from a social media chair to an engagement chair to kind of have a more broader focus on what recruitment looks like and what engagement looks like outside of social media, right, because there, you can also talk to clubs, you can talk to fraternities and sororities. You can go through social media. So for us, it's on the radar, but it's not like at the forefront of what we do. I like that you changed the social media chair to the engagement chair and what you said is really accurate about, instead of just going through social media as your main source of trying to gain some engagement, going through other clubs and having other even social media accounts. You know, I'm thinking of, you know, other UVM run accounts on Instagram, like her campus, which I write for. And, you know, just something like that, like bring, bring more awareness to, you know, a completely different demographic of people that might not have, you know, voter turnout and registration on like the forefront of their mind is, yeah, it's important. And it's really interesting that you brought that up. Like thinking about these windows for collaboration with other groups on campus has been something I really started taking more seriously in the second half of this semester. And I've been toying with the idea of what it would mean to have a voting summit once a year where like any interested club or affinity group on campus would get together. And we just have like a meeting of minds about what it could look like to improve the condition of voting on campus, what people are looking for, even if they feel like they don't have the time or energy to contribute. And then maybe what clubs feel like they do have some time or energy to contribute. I think that kind of like touch point once a year would make a lot of sense and help make this dialogue rather than a once off. Yeah, that would do a lot for the community, honestly. I think that'd be a really good idea. So, excuse me, I'm going to sneeze. Oh my gosh, I have bad allergies right now. There's nothing worse than anticipating this needs. Yep. Alright, so our second to last question is, are you familiar with town meeting TV. I was not formerly familiar with town meeting TV, but I looked at a friend of mine looked up with me. He said, Oh, I get it. They're the c span of local television, which I feel like are high marks. Yeah, yeah, town meeting TV has become something that you know I didn't even know about until I started working on this project. And, you know, they've done a lot and we're, you know, our project right now we're focusing on making the content more accessible and interesting for a college demographic. So, our demographic was or CCTVs demographic was, you know, much less about college students at the beginning of it. So, that's why we're conducting these interviews with UVM students who are interested and passionate about, you know, voter turnout and, you know, local politics and making like local changes and everything and the other next steps in our project, you know, just going off of this question just about town meeting TV. So we're taking content actually the post that we just posted. Peter worked on it. And it's all about, you know, we're taking content from the YouTube channel and posting it on the Instagram to just keep the content as easily accessible for a large group of people as possible. So, it's a really cool project that we're working on. And I'm grateful to be able to, you know, expand my knowledge on so many different issues that are going on locally. I like it a lot because you and I are just both at different ends of the same frontier, which is finding ways to lower barriers to access for information. It was just about the information cost to knowing how to participate in your local community. Definitely. Yeah. All right. Last question is, in your opinion, why is it important for college students to be politically active in the town that they live in at the moment? Yeah, I think it's important for a few reasons. The first of these is that, especially here in Vermont, this is just a logistical point. It's very easy. We have same day voter registration. And you can, it's not just same day voter registration. Once you're at the polls, you can do it from a computer. You can do it from your phone. You do it online. And it's only a few steps and there's not very much information required, which means getting set up to have the infrastructure to vote here is very simple. The second reason is ideological. It has to do with like how we receive information and receive feedback. And it's that when you participate in local politics, it's a lot easier to see in at least some fashion what impact your vote has had. If you vote in an election back in your home state, maybe you can do like the electoral calculus and maybe that had a more like a broader impact based on your electoral power, but I don't know if that's the best way to build habits. If you're having trouble being like, ah, where should I vote? I'm not really sure. Just settle for the place you are. It's not even settling because you get to understand in a more material way when something, when a town initiative happens, you somehow play a role in that. And then the final reason I would say has to do with the fact that it's something you can talk about with your friends. So it becomes social. It becomes something where you all have a common denominator that otherwise would have been inaccessible unless you happen to have like a friend from whichever state you hail from, like Wyoming. Maybe like 50 UVM students come from Wyoming. So if you're from there, you, you might be interested in if you want to have a social conversation about politics. Yeah, politics. It might make sense to vote here. Definitely. Yeah, I really like that that it becomes a social thing, you know, it becomes something that you can talk about with your peers and, you know, brings a greater connection to the community that, you know, we live in at the moment, which is really important. Yeah, definitely. Well, I really appreciate you sitting and talking with me. The conversation that we just had was phenomenal. And I'm so grateful that made this work finally because it's taken us a little while. So that's not meant you pulled us through. That's it. No, you I really, you really, yeah, you really pulled through and, you know, your answers to these questions were amazing. And we're all very grateful. Everyone here at my on my team, especially and our followers are very grateful that, you know, we got to talk like this. It was easy to get questions. So thank you to the team. Thank you so much. And good luck with everything that you are continuing to do. Good luck with the rest of school and bringing UVM votes, you know, to the forefront of everyone's mind. So thank you. Thank you very much. Good luck with the rest of your work as well. Thank you.