Overview

The SchoolVote project team's mission at Sample Public Schools is to give students realistic election campaign participation experiences. We hope these experiences will reinforce their desire to vote when eligible, and to become active in local, state and national politics.

We implement this mission by...

• Bringing campaigns online. Candidates for student government offices now have an easy way to publish their campaign information on the school's local intranet.
• Publishing endorsements. Students can influence election outcomes by giving detailed endorsements to the candidates they favor.
• Promoting informed voting. We encourage all students to review the information provided at the sample.schoolvote.org website before voting.

With SchoolVote, candidates have...

• A simple interface for entering and managing their campaign information online. Candidates can update and expand their information quickly, whenever they want to.
• Flexibility to handle the most important types of campaign information. They can publish their profiles (photos and contact information), background and interest statements, endorsements (name-only and detailed), and more.

As more candidates use SchoolVote, voters gain several benefits...

• Availability: Information about candidates is available from computers in the school's buildings all day, every day.
• Comparability: Information about candidates is provided in one place (this website) and in one standard format.
• Freshness/Currency: Because this website is easy for candidates to use, it enables candidates to give voters the most up-to-date information about their campaigns.

A Unique Service

We encourage you, the students at Sample Public Schools, to help make the sample.schoolvote.org website as useful and instructive as possible by offering to provide your endorsements to the candidates you think are best qualified. Your fellow students will benefit from your efforts.

The key issue is trust. While a student may not know enough about a given candidate to support him or her with confidence, the student may know one or more of the candidate's endorsement providers. Trust in endorsement providers can substitute for trust in candidates when the latter is not attainable directly, due to a lack of familiarity.

SchoolVote helps student voters learn why candidates they may not know can be trusted with their votes; it satisfies three specific requirements for building trust relationships:

1. Large Collections: Candidates can publish large numbers of endorsements, thereby ensuring that most students will know one or more of their endorsement providers.
2. Explanations of Familiarity: Endorsement providers can explain how they know candidates, so that students can determine whether a provider is sufficiently familiar with a candidate to warrant trusting his or her opinion.
3. Explanations of Support: Endorsement providers can explain why they support candidates, so that students can determine whether a given provider's reasons satisfy their own expectations for qualified candidates.

SchoolVote is a new concept in student voter education. It helps students become better informed election participants and increases the likelihood that the best qualified candidates will be elected.

Suggested Reading

SchoolVote fosters strong civic norms among high school students... just what is needed today to arrest and reverse the trend of declining participation among young voters. For an in-depth explanation of how fostering strong civic norms among High School students leads to a greater likelihood of voting for well over a decade following high school, read Why We Vote: How Schools and Communities Shape Our Civic Life by David E. Campbell. The SchoolVote program is not supported by Dr. Campbell or his publisher.