Election-themed film festival urges students to vote in November

The United States will be voting for its next president in less than a month. To prepare for this, Vote Oswego is trying to get as many students as possible to register to vote as the demographic least likely to vote is 18-29.

Vote Oswego is a nonpartisan organization on campus whose goal is to get as many students as possible excited about voting and using their right to vote.

“In terms of what most students on the campus see, it’s designed to be a nonpartisan voter engagement campaign that supports students in a nonpartisan way through every part of the voting process,” Allison Rank, Vote Oswego campaign manager and political science professor, said. 

Vote Oswego held its second “Get Out the Vote” film festival on Oct. 18. Students teamed up to create short films to inspire students to vote.

“I wanted to think of an entertaining way to convince students that they needed to vote,” Juliet Giglio, creative writing professor, said. “It really was to bring everyone together in an event like this and really hopefully change their mind on not voting and maybe convince them that we should vote.”

The festival consisted of ten short films, which were given various awards from judges across the country. Morgan Schaffer’s “A New Act” won Best Screenplay and “President Pizza” won Best Film from an audience vote.

Many of the students realized just how important it is to get out and vote for this film festival.

Janelle Williams, a screenwriter for “Answering the Call” said that she wanted to inspire “a lot of the younger people that just don’t genuinely care about politics, because we have a lot in our generation.”

Each filmmaker had a different angle for getting the student body excited to vote, but in the end, the goal was to make it so that people would want to vote in order to make a difference.

“I just wanted to reach out to more people in college,” Schaffer said, “because we’re all here going into the professional world. And we got to see how this future legislation is going to affect our professional jobs.”

This event was “strategic,” Giglio said, because New York state is coming up to its deadline for voter registration, Oct. 26. It was also a way for students to be able to ask questions about absentee voting if they do not live in Oswego County, but still want to vote in their hometown.

“It’s really easy to do, but if you miss the deadlines, you’re stuck,” Giglio said, “because what if the mail doesn’t come? This is the time to do it now.”

The film festival inspired many people in attendance to vote and the organizers could see that as well.

“I was hoping we’d get a lot of students who wouldn’t otherwise be necessarily thinking about voting to come out and think about it,” Rank said, “and potentially if they’re not registered or haven’t taken the time to request their absentee ballot, would get that done as well.

Photo by Maria Pawelczyk