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Pasco High School Vote in White House Straw Poll

Klint Lowry/SUNCOAST NEWS

Hudson High School freshman Richard Fernanadez casts his ballot while fellow students Corey Brown and Julia Phillips check the school roster during a countywide high school presidential straw poll sponsored by the Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Office and Kids Voting Tampa Bay.

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By Klint  Lowry | The Suncoast News

Published: January 23, 2008

NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla - NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla - With the 2008 presidential race coming to Florida for the state's Jan. 29 primary, Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Brian E. Corley, Kids Voting Tampa Bay and the Pasco School District figured this would be a good chance to initiate the next generation of voters.

Together, they sponsored the first-ever countywide high school Presidential Preference straw poll last Friday. Held at every public high school in the county, the event gave about 19,000 students the chance to see what it's like to add their voices to the public consensus.

"This sends a great message to students that we are interested in their opinions," Corley said. "It will be a real-life civics lesson that will motivate our young citizens to vote as adults."

That isn't that far away, Corley noted. A majority of this year's graduating class will turn 18 in time to register to vote for real in the 2008 general election. The aim of this straw poll is to get them thinking about the right to vote they are about to inherit as American citizens.

Ron Eckstein, chairman of the social studies department at Hudson High School, described how his school has been covering the election.

"We've been talking about this whole primary process," Eckstein said.

There were several Web sites, he explained, where users can answer questions about how they feel about major issues, then find out which candidate best matches the user's viewpoints.

Eckstein added they also pointed the students to the candidates' campaign Web sites, and had in-class discussions of some of the major campaign issues and of the electoral process.

The 2008 campaign is shaping up to be a good one for holding young people's attention, Eckstein said. The races in both parties are up for grabs. There also are the first female and the first African-American candidates who have a serious shot at winning.

Young people may not realize what a precedent-setting event either of those scenarios would be, Eckstein added, and that's opened the door for more class discussions.

Unlike many schools, where the voting was done in class, Hudson decided to make the experience a little more like the real thing by putting it on the students to make the effort to go vote. Julia Phillips was one of several students who volunteered to work the school polling station for the straw poll.

During a lull, Julia said she had learned a few things from the election. Her class has been going over the candidates and their backgrounds a bit each day for the last couple of weeks, and she'd gained new understanding of this election in particular, and of the presidential election process.

"I didn't know they had to pick one Democrat, one Republican," she said, referring to the party nomination process.

The only real flaw she sees in the system is "when people make judgments without knowing anything about it" – a problem inherent in any democracy.

The students voted on paper ballots provided by Kids Voting Tampa Bay. The ballots included the names of all the candidates from both major parties, alphabetically, without any reference to their party affiliation.

By 1 p.m., the voting was pretty much done at most schools. Each school tallied up its results and sent them to the Supervisor of Elections office. There, all the schools' totals were to be combined.

Shortly after 1 p.m., Scott Williams, head of the social studies department at J. W. Mitchell High School, in Trinity, had some early returns tallied at his school.

"I feel like Tim Russert from NBC News, analyzing the polling," Williams said, referring to the host of "Meet the Press."

At Mitchell, it looked like Democrat front-runners Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton were going to claim the lion's share of the votes, with Obama getting the better of it.

"It's basically name recognition," Williams concluded. From what he's taken in, students are influenced greatly by the amount of media coverage the candidates get, and the battle between these two gets the most ink and airtime.

If young people are energized in this election, he thinks it will be good news for Obama.

But that's a big if. Williams pointed out that straw polls held at Mitchell in 2000 and 2004 had big, enthusiastic turnouts among students. But it's still a challenge to keep that momentum going once they become adults and the voting is for real.

"It baffles me," Williams said. "Kids say they vote, but that age group, 18 to 30, it's like they have other things on their minds."

To prevent any possibility of having an undue influence on the actual Florida primaries, results of the Presidential Preference high school straw poll will be held until 7 p.m. Jan. 29, when they will be made available online at the Pasco Supervisor of Elections Office href=http://www.pascovotes.com> Web site.

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