I’m sharing this story after visiting the Flaten Art Museum exhibit titled Practicing Democracy: 150 Years of St. Olaf Student Civic Engagement, which highlights chapters of get-out-the-vote activism at St. Olaf.

In 1984 a group of us had a vision of consolidating and streamlining the work of many different social justice groups on campus into one larger group called the St. Olaf Social Justice Coalition. Our first project of the year was to campaign for Secretary of State Joan Growe in her race for United States Senator. Our strategy was to raise awareness of the primary election on September 11 and support students in getting to the polls. We planned to staff a table at the student center and run shuttles down to the two polling places where St. Olaf students could vote using a college van we arranged to borrow.

On the morning of election day, I walked down to the polling place to vote as soon as they opened to do a trial vote before we drove everyone else down there. When asked to provide evidence of my address, I showed my student ID. The poll worker said loudly to everyone in the room, “Oh dear, I hope all the college students won’t be disenfranchised again this year!” She explained to me that since the college straddled two precincts, she could not know which one I lived in since my ID did not indicate what dorm I was in. There was nothing she could do about it.

I went back up to campus and woke up my roommate, Heather Ferguson, to help me solve this problem. We walked to Dean of Students Carol Johnson’s office and told her that the college needed to provide students with IDs showing addresses for the dorms in order for us to be able to vote. She empathized but told us there was nothing she could do about it. We called the Secretary of States’s office and then sat in in the dean’s office all morning. Eventually the Secretary of State’s office contacted the college and told them they needed to have an official sit down at the polling places with a student directory and verify which dorm the students lived in so that we could vote. Around noon, Dean Johnson went to one polling place and sent a delegate to another. They stayed until the polls closed. We were able to get our van shuttle up and running and get everyone down to vote.

When the dean saw us in the hall the next day, she said, “I’m not going to do that again!” By the next election year, student IDs contained the addresses of the dorms.

Heather and I barely knew each other when we sat in in the dean’s office. Forty years later, we are married and have two adult children. Ensuring all the St. Olaf students could vote in the 1984 primary is the first great thing we did together!