Diamondback stats on voter registration misleading

In The Diamondback’s Oct. 18 article, “Candidates Focus on Getting Students to Polls,” reporter Alan McCombs again pointed to misleading data to make the case that voter registration has been marginal, at best.

The fact is that Maryland Votes, Maryland PIRG and other groups have registered more than 2,500 student voters at College Park and more than 10,000 statewide – a significant and positive increase in young voter registration here in Maryland and an indicator of a nationwide trend in young adults’ increasing political participation.

By reporting only the number of people on the voting rolls in the county, the article omits two key factors:

1. Maryland Votes, Maryland PIRG and other groups registered more than 1,000 new student voters from Oct. 8 to 17. Because these 1,000 forms were turned in to the county clerk’s office in the last week before the deadline, none of these voters are on the voting rolls yet.

2. Prince George’s County’s Election office has been processing voter registration forms for just 19 days (Sept. 29 to Oct. 17). It is unlikely that they have processed all the forms turned in for the entire county between Aug. 23 and Oct. 17. During this period, Maryland Votes registered about 1,800 Prince George’s County voters at UMD and 400 voters at Prince George’s Community College.

This poor reporting is an echo of articles in August. The article first pointed out that only a handful of students had registered to vote on the campus before the primary deadline. Because the primary deadline was Aug. 23rd (before any students had moved in on the campus), it would have been impossible for anyone except for a Resident Assistant to register on the campus. The second attacked the Student Government Association for not doing more to turn out campus voters for the primary election. Because only off-campus students could have registered before the primary deadline, SGA did the smartest thing it could, calling all the young voters it could identify off campus.

Voter registration efforts have been successful on the campus. Maryland Votes, with help from SGA, and Maryland PIRG registered more than 2,500 student voters at UMD. Focusing on numbers like these is both more accurate and of greater service to the new voting community than continuing to belittle campus voter registration efforts with misleading statistics.

Billy GraysonDirectorMaryland Votes

Colleen SpiveyCampus OrganizerMaryland PIRG

Men dropping ball in the bucket

While many students at the university are upset at the recent results from the men’s basketball team, Laura Caputo’s Oct. 17 article in The Diamondback was a badly veiled attempt to smear a genuinely successful team. Her claim that the men’s team doesn’t win games doesn’t account for the fact that in the past four seasons the win total has been 21, 20, 19, 19. I am a Maryland basketball fan and I understand that the NIT is not good enough, but do not claim that we haven’t won games or have been on a “losing streak” when that is not reality.

To claim that the men’s graduation rate isn’t high enough is very hypocritical. In 2002, when Maryland won the National Championship, we had a graduation rate of exactly 0 percent, so ultimately which do you want, National Championships or players graduating at a higher rate?

The men graduating at a lower rate can also be attributed to the presence of the NBA, and the money and fame it entices from players who aren’t seniors. The WNBA has no such draw, and subsequently many more collegiate female basketball players graduate. In the future, when we have columns about sports in The Diamondback, I hope they are written by genuine sports fans who actually know something about Maryland athletics. Go Terps!

Jonathan Bell-FeinsSophomoreKinesiology

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