Featured Fellows: Matt Popek and Trey Thomas

2008 YP4 fellow Matt Popek is a rising senior at Penn State University majoring in urban and regional development. He is a founding member and current president of Represent Penn State, a nonpartisan student voter registration and get-out-the-vote organization. 2006 fellow Trey Thomas is finishing a joint bachelor’s and master’s degree in political science. He is founder, former chair, and current technology coordinator for Represent Penn State. Matt and Trey spoke with us recently about how Represent Penn State is changing the way students register to vote.

Interview conducted by Dan Klein, spring and summer 2008 YP4 communications intern, for June 2008.

Matt and Trey, what do you stand for?

MP: Well, we stand for student voter participation, especially on our campus at Penn State. We’re hoping to branch out a bit with what we’re doing for the upcoming election and effect change at several other universities.

Tell me about your Blueprint for Social Justice.

TT: So our Blueprint essentially outlines our goal to make voter registration at Penn State as easy and efficient as possible. What we’re doing is building a completely custom voter registration system just for Penn State students. It really goes beyond rockthevote.com and other free registration programs because we can control everything on the forms. All the data that’s coming in we can error check and do it exactly how we want so that way we’re making a system that’s not only easy for students to register but also makes the process more efficient.

MP: Do you want to talk about the Blueprint that got us started, Trey?

TT: Sure. I’m a rising student senior now and I started represent Penn State in 2006 with two other fellows. Our Blueprint was simply to form a centralized umbrella organization for voter registration on campus. We’ve done that the last 3 years and now Matt is taking over as president this fall and we’re doing this blueprint to…

(Trey gets disconnected)

Hello?

MP: Hello?... Trey?

I think we just lost Trey

MP: I think we lost Trey, too.

(Chaos ensues)

MP: I can try to fill in the gap there. He started this thing in 2006 and he used his initial Blueprint in 2006 to get voter registration organized and have one singular organization taking care of everything on campus. We were successful doing that in the 2006 midterm election and then we continued into the 2007 off-year elections. This year, the past semester and the spring, we started working with a number of different organizations to try to get students registered for the primary, especially after we realized that Pennsylvania would play some sort of important role. We were successful and had a number of different organizations come to work with us and we’re looking forward to continuing to work with them into the fall for the general election.

How does your new Blueprint, the website, differ from other voter registration websites?

MP: We tried using the Rock the Vote system last year and the biggest problem was that the instructions were not clear enough for our targeted audience, college students. When you go into the Rock the Vote site they list your address as your home address. A lot of students got confused and thought that meant their actual home address and not their campus address. Since a lot of students who go to Penn State don’t live within a drivable distance on Election Day, they were registering to vote back home instead of at school—which is where we wanted them to register.

So what we’re hoping to do with this new Blueprint is save any sort of errors from people typing in their home address and getting them to register at college so they don’t have to go through the absentee ballot process. There were a number of other errors with either paper ballots or generically designed online forms that we’re hoping to drastically reduce or eliminate.

(We talk about how much we miss Trey.)

(Trey comes back… thanks to the power of positive thinking!)

MP: Glad you came back... Maybe you could provide more detail as to why our Blueprint is really necessary.

TT: Did you get the end of what I was saying when it cut out?

Go ahead.

TT: This Blueprint is building on our founding Blueprint. We’re really trying to use this one to build some lasting infrastructure as far as voting goes on campus. By building this website we’re not only making it easier to vote in the fall, but we’re providing the system that will help our organization sustain itself over the next few years. Students will realize, “Hey, they have this website that they created, they must be doing something.”

Part of creating our own rather than using some free service... of course it’s about efficiency and being able to get the data we want out of it, but also it’s the branding too, because we can host it on our own domain rather than linking to some other website that people don’t really know is us. It’s just great that we can control everything and build it into our organization

How do you keep your organization sustainable?

TT: Definitely by bringing in younger people. Two of our officers for the fall are sophomores, and they’ll be around for a while. Recruiting younger students into the executive board allows them to get the experience during this big election in the fall that they can use to attract new people in the future.

MP: It’s also been a lot of personal effort making sure you remember that the cause you’re working for is important and is one you should keep working for it. Sometimes it feels like there aren’t enough people who want to get involved, but it’s up to you personally to make sure that everything you want to get done actually does get done.

TT: Having the website itself allows us to sustain our organization effectively, because we don’t have the massive numbers of, say, Students for Barack Obama. So by creating this website we’re multiplying our effectiveness for the smaller number of volunteers that we have. The few volunteers can advertise this website as opposed to having 30 people walking the streets every day registering people. We can have the same effectiveness with a smaller group.

MP: Nonpartisan voter registration is decidedly unsexy. So we’re hoping that getting all these systems set up will help us out in the long run so we won’t need as many people continuing forward.

Or make it sexier?

MP: We’re always looking for more opportunities to make it sexy, that’s just so hard to come by these days.

What have been your biggest struggles as progressive leaders?

MP: Trey?

TT: The biggest thing at our campus, because there are 770 organizations now, is that everything has its little niche. So it’s been hard for us to reach out to these different groups who undoubtedly believe in what we’re doing, but they’re so focused on their niche that they don’t necessarily have the time to commit to working with us. So even though we agree with these groups and they like voter registration, they aren’t necessarily able to lend us the volunteers that we’d like. So that’s been tough, trying to mobilize other progressive groups to really get involved in what we’re doing.

MP: It’s been difficult at times to convince people that a tangentially related activity to what their organizations are doing is important enough to send volunteers or co-host activities... People are more interested in doing the primary mission of their organization rather than the secondary mission.

What have been some of your biggest successes?

MP: I think we’ve been successful in getting students to start noticing [the organization]; we’ve had newspaper articles written about us and other organizations are slowly starting to come around and realize yes, there is an established organization working for that purpose at Penn State. I think we’re starting to enter that phase, where we’ve done the dirty work on the ground, getting people to register in person, going down the sidewalk, and after awhile you hope that starts sinking in not just to each individual person, but also starts sinking in on a campus scale — the collective consciousness of the campus.

TT: Since we started in 2006 we’ve had increases in turnout from the previous comparable election, [going] from 24% to 118%. Even in this last primary we contributed to an increase in turnout of 2700% on campus. So every year we’ve been here we’ve seen double-digit increases in turnout.

MP: We understand that it’s not all us.

TT: Of course not.

MP: It’s sort of misleading, because we’re comparing this to 2000 when only 89 students voted on campus in the presidential primary... I’m sure we were a part of the push to register and get students to the polls, but there were other organizations working as well. Plus it’s an entire nationwide trend of students becoming more involved in national politics.

What’s a strategy you’ve found that works?

TT: We know certain places on campus that are best, we know certain days and certain times that are best — for example Tuesday in the afternoon outside the Willard building, that’s probably the best place you can get. We use the national form rather than the Pennsylvanian form, we found people fill those out much more accurately. Whenever we find the best place, we try to take out the guesswork and make it as easy as possible too.

Any strategies that haven’t worked very well?

MP: I think registering people outside of a football game didn’t work so well.

TT: Yeah that was terrible. [laughs] Football and politics don’t mix.

MP: It’s really been a matter of guess and check, trial and error. It’s a matter of seeing what’s going on around campus and when people would be receptive to registering. Although everyone involved in politics knows it’s a really easy and quick process and there’s no excuse for it not to get done, but we’re still trying to get that to sink into the campus environment.

What inspired you to apply for the YP4 fellowship?

MP: That would be Trey, I’ll let Trey answer that one.

TT: I won’t say I forced Matt... but I definitely talked to him about what it means to the organization and what benefits YP4 could provide not just for us but for him with leadership training.

When I applied I was just starting to get into campus politics. I had campaigned a bit [on a presidential] campaign. But it was being part of an organization that was more than a conference; it was a long-term thing. I’ve been talking to [YP4 fellowship director] Rachel Burrows for three years now and so it’s really been a great experience. Why I applied? Definitely the long-term support.

Matt, what have you liked about the program so far?

MP: For Trey, the long-term support has been top notch, but I’m going to have to take his word for it... although I might end up experiencing it over the next couple of years. The benefit for me has been the level of follow-up—not even long-term, but the short term—getting everything ready for submitting the Blueprint, connecting with all the other fellows across the country who are involved in the same kind of social justice work that I was interested in has been invaluable. I know that there are a bunch of people out there who I could go up to and say, “Are you ready to get going with this?” and they’d say “Yup! We’re ready to go.” The connections have been really valuable so far.

TT: I think the support for our specific Blueprint... we came up this idea and said, “Hey, would this be a good thing for us to do?” and Rachel and the staff said, “Yeah, definitely. Look into it some more, give us some more details and then if it looks good we’ll fund you.” And that’s what happened. There’s a lot of support for innovation and entrepreneurship within organizing; it’s so beneficial.

How would you like to see the progressive movement change for the future?

MP: Just speaking from our experience at Penn State, I’d like to see us get better organized together. To see that we’re all working for the same set of goals, although we’re not working for the same individual goals necessarily, but it’s the set of goals that’s far more important than any of our individual goals. Somehow we need to get better organized. There are too many people running around even now, today, doing their own thing and not thinking two steps ahead, three steps ahead and how this could change two years down the line, five years down, 50 years down the line. Better organization is where we’re going to need to start to take the movement beyond what it is now.

I think a program such as YP4 is a fundamental part of doing something like that because it’s one of those places where you can get an organization caring about a number of different goals and ideals. We’ve already seen where we can go with that with a number of different Blueprints. Just look at Penn State campuses: three other students went with me to the YP4 conference, and now we’re working on completely different things — but we all feel like we belong to the same overarching movement because of the organization that YP4 has provided.

What’s next for both of you?

TT: Well, I’m working on my master’s next year and after that hopefully a Ph.D. somewhere. That’s a little different than organizing, but I’ll continue what I’ve done politically somewhere else. If I end up working for my Ph.D. on a campus that doesn’t have any GOTV [get out the vote] infrastructure, I’d be happy to organize something there like that [by] working with the people there.

MP: Kind of the same thing with me, I’m going to be majoring in a geography program for urban and regional development so I’m not planning on spending 100 percent of my time in politics. Right now it’s just been an entirely timesinking hobby, but it’s a hobby I enjoy a lot. In the future I’d like to go to grad school for some kind of regional planning degree. I really have no idea about that just yet, but I think I’ll continue my hobby of working in the political process as much as I can.

TT: It’s been really interesting for me, because I’ve spent the last couple years doing this vote work on the ground and just recently one of my classes was reading about mobilizing people to vote and I’ve been really able to look at the theories in the context of my work I’ve done through YP4. It’s really helped me make a connection between the practical and the theoretical.

MP: I think the practical experience also applies to things outside of political science. It’s really a life lesson and it’s a great life lesson within the laboratory that is the university setting — working on organizing people and getting the entire population to pay attention to the message that you’re sending, and then making people follow through. That applies to so many different fields, especially with the way the American economy is turning into a service-based economy. Here comes the word again: invaluable — but I couldn’t put a price on the experience I’ve gotten here.

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