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A student petition calling on Harvard administrators to designate federal Election Day a University-wide holiday has garnered more than 380 signatures as of Wednesday night.
The petition, spearheaded by the Institute of Politics’ Harvard Votes Challenge and endorsed by 15 student organizations, urges Harvard leadership to create a “University-wide academic holiday and day of civic action” called “Democracy Day.” Its first installment would be November 5, 2024 — the next federal election date.
The petition marks students’ second endeavor to address what they describe as “civic disengagement” at Harvard. In 2021, a similar petition to launch Democracy Day at Harvard obtained roughly 2,000 signatures.
Harvard Votes Challenge petition leader Jonah B. Simon ’26 said he believes there is a heightened sense of urgency around civic engagement, despite the 2023 petition receiving far fewer signatures than the 2021 effort as of Wednesday evening.
“There have been several states across the country that have either introduced legislation for abridging voting rights and making it more challenging for people to vote, that’s things like voter ID laws and restricting early voting,” Simon said.
“We think that the stakes are a lot higher now, and so it feels much more urgent to me to make this happen now,” he added.
Students initiated the position in response to a statistic that found 29.4 percent of all eligible Harvard students did not cast ballots during the 2020 presidential election, in comparison to 31.6 percent of eligible Boston voters.
On average, in colleges across the nation, around 34 percent of eligible students did not vote in the election, according to a Tufts study.
Simon said he believes Harvard is “behind in the Ivy League” in designating Election Day as a holiday.
Currently, Columbia, Brown and Stanford have designated Election Day a holiday. Yale and Princeton students have launched petitions for the day off, though they failed to gain traction with their respective administrations.
If the initiative is adopted by Harvard, Democracy Day would include programming such as youth athletic clinics where parents can drop off children while voting and a student-run hotline to answer election questions.
“No other university has proposed anything on the scope of what we’re pushing for, which is, first of all, University-wide. Second of all, applies not just to students but to staff in some capacity,” Simon said.
A Democracy Day concept paper prepared by Simon and presented alongside the petition criticized Harvard as “failing to live up to its reputation as a global leader in civic education and thought.”
“Harvard is failing to offer students the necessary resources and motivation to become civically active, and is thus falling short of its stated mission,” the paper reads.
Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton declined to comment on the campaign and referred The Crimson to a September 2022 statement by University President Lawrence S. Bacow encouraging civic action.
“If you are eligible to vote, I encourage you to visit the nonpartisan Harvard Votes Challenge website,” Bacow wrote in September.
Though IOP staff supports students in their efforts to increase civic engagement on campus, the IOP does not endorse specific campaigns.
Currently the Democracy Day petition has 340 signatures from students at the College and fewer than 30 signatures from students at Harvard’s other schools.
Simon said petition organizers are open to changes that apply only to the College, as opposed to the originally proposed University-wide changes.
“Right now we are pushing for a University-wide day of civic action, but whatever we can do to expand our impact, whatever we can do counts and matters,” he added.
—Staff writer Thomas J. Mete can be reached at thomas.mete@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @thomasjmete.
