LSU football may not be preparing for a game this weekend, but it’s taking advantage of the free time to take on a different challenge: getting the team registered to vote.
With the general election on Nov. 5 and the online registration deadline set for Oct. 15, the time is now for everyone, including student-athletes, to get ready to go to the polls.
Dr. DF Arnold, the assistant AD of player development for football, said the idea to get the team registered came when he was thinking of his 21-year old son and 18-year old daughter.
“I thought about just how important it was, and just how this would be their first time voting,” Arnold said. “And then it made me think, dang, my guys, many of my guys, this is their first time voting.”
From there, Arnold reached out to LSU’s student affairs and was connected with Geaux Vote LSU, a student organization dedicated to civic engagement and getting students involved in the political process.
Emma Long, a senior in mass communications who’s the club’s president, was excited to hear from the team, especially because it was unprompted.
“In order to reach student-athletes, it’s a little trickier than the normal student body, just because they’re typically busier,” Long said. “We definitely want to tap in and make sure that the entire student population is reached by our work.”
Long and Geaux Vote Vice President Sy’Rai Adams gave the team a presentation during its mandatory team meeting on Monday, highlighting why it’s important to vote and how the players could go about doing it. The meeting was attended by all 113 players on LSU’s roster.
Arnold said the presentation was met with enthusiasm, with players telling him after that they were excited to vote.
“The word that was used by one of my guys is just how ‘grown’ it feels,” Arnold said.
The presentation included QR codes that sent players directly to where they could register to vote (a process that takes just minutes), and Arnold said the majority of players scanned the codes and started the process.
Long and Arnold said the players were engaged and respectful during the presentation and asked questions, including about how non-Louisiana residents would go about getting registered to vote.
With it being the bye week and with many players planning to head home, it was the perfect time for players who come from states without online registration to get informed about their procedures.
Arnold said he emphasized to the team how important it was to vote given the context of how so many in the past, like women and people of color, haven’t had the opportunity. In addition, he made sure athletes knew that, no matter what people say, their vote matters.
A voter registration push is something Arnold had done with his teams in the past when he worked at Grand Valley State prior to 2022, as well as something current LSU head coach Brian Kelly instated while he was at Notre Dame.
Kelly has repeatedly said that this year’s team is the most accountable he’s had at LSU, and Arnold says that’s translated to how they’ve approached this, as well.
“This building is a high-performance building, and that’s high performance in all that we do,” Arnold said. “Everything that we’re talking about is transferable to everything.”
Geaux Vote has also been in touch with LSU Athletics about further partnership to reach other student-athletes, which could include setting up an information table in the coming weeks in the Cox Communications Academic Center for Student-Athletes, according to Long.
According to a 2022 report by the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, LSU had 71.2% of its voting-eligible students register to vote that year. Geaux Vote’s goal is to get that number up to 85 to 90% this year.
The organization also has big plans coming up as it turns from voter registration to increasing voter turnout.
“Our goal at Geaux Vote always is to turn first-time voters into lifelong voters,” Long said.