"Voting is so easy, so not physically demanding, so easy to dramatize. It's

so disappointing that people don't care to vote," says Emily Carmichael, a first-year, minutes before she leaves for the airport.

Carmichael lives in New York, and neglected to request an absentee ballot. But bar a catastrophe, she'll add her vote to Ralph Nader's presidential tally. Carmichael, who is also a Crimson cartoonist, planned to scurry to Logan, hop on a Delta Shuttle and vote with her mother in their Upper West Side precinct.

Though she readily admits she doesn't know much about politics, Carmichael says she became committed to voting because of her first voting experience, when, in 1996 she went to the polls and voted with her mother.

"What we did was, we voted for Bill Clinton, we voted for all the women candidates, for the people who had Spanish-sounding names," she said.

(This year, the Democrat says she'll cast a vote for Rick Lazio because "his name sounds Italian.")

This semester, she's taking a government class, and wrote a paper on voter turnout. There is no escaping politics at Harvard.

"The atmosphere of vital, interested discourse that is all around me is staggering," she says.