A screening of the documentary “One Vote” was used to showcase the importance of voting and diversity within the voting booths to students. Residence Life sponsored the event. Assistant professor and director of teaching fellows Sherell Fuller, and John Holder, adjunct faculty in political science, answered student questions and participated in a panel discussing the issues addressed in the documentary.
The panelists and Residence Life said that they wanted to make sure that the audience and students left with as much information as possible.
“Vote. Be Educated. We want to get people registered but know what you’re voting about. Don’t just vote based on emotion only, don’t just listen to what someone else tells you,” Fuller said.
The documentary followed multiple people from different states, backgrounds, ethnic groups and socio-economic statuses. The “One Vote” documentary attempted to use ordinary citizens’ perspectives and focused on their struggles through life and voting in the United States.
The documentary showcased the struggles that the people had to go through in order to vote. Two of the people in the documentary, Claude and Jennifer Bondy, lived in a small town in Arkansas where they had to take a dog sled to their car to drive 70 miles to a voting center.
South Carolinian Brenda Williams was a main focus of the documentary. She said that she wants to inform american citizens of the importance of voting and she said that people, especially minorities, should vote because it is their inalienable right that took centuries to obtain.
“Black people can now vote next to the place where they picked cotton…We went from the cotton fields to being voters and then to being president,” Williams said.
Every person’s story showed the different aspects of american society, but they said that they wanted to express one thing to American citizens: voting is power. Holder said that the goal of the documentary and the panel was to express that voting is a natural right that all American citizens should take advantage of.
“This is how your interest gets represented. If you’re a student at a state university, the state government determines how much you pay for tuition, it determines your taxes, your services, how much you get charged and how good the schools are….This is how you get a voice in your government,” Holder said.
Midterm elections will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 6 where all 435 seats in the house of representatives and 35 seats in the senate will be contested.
