Annette Bernsten
Lantern Staff
On Thursday, Sept. 17, Micaela Ayers, director of library services, hosted a virtual event in celebration of Constitution Day. The meeting discussed important aspects of the electoral college and why individuals are encouraged to vote in the upcoming elections.
“The library has presented a scholarly program annually as an opportunity to broaden the college experience for students, staff and faculty, as well as our community,” Ayers said. “Dr. Esam Mohammad wanted to offer his expertise as a researcher as we navigate this election year on why pollsters and the public need to interpret the presidential polling currently underway with the facts of the electoral college.”
Ayers began the meeting by stating its purpose: to inform viewers about the importance of the U.S. Constitution and the rights it lays out for individuals. She then transferred the meeting over to Bill Young, mayor of El Dorado and vice president of digital transformation information services.
Young began his speech with an excerpt from the Constitution; the famous first paragraph, which reads as follows: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Young then explained the importance of the Constitution in our lives and how elections are generally run through electoral colleges. Mohammad Esam, the associate vice president of research and institutional effectiveness, took over the meeting after Young.
Esam first explained the basics of the electoral college, which is that a president is elected by a certain number of electors chosen to represent the number of the state’s representatives in Congress. He then explained how the number of electors are chosen based off the population of the state.
“The other thing that this [the process of choosing electors] does is it kind of highlights the importance of the census when we do our census count every 10 years,” Young said during the meeting. “It’s important that everyone fills out their census when it comes out and sends it back because then that goes back to the Census Bureau and that may change the number of representatives that a state might have based on population growth or if the population has shrunk in those states.”
After comparing an electoral vote to a popular vote, Esam mentioned that there have been five instances in the history of elections where these two did not align, the most recent of which was the 2016 presidential election.
“You know, these days we’re getting opinion polling almost every day,” Esam said during the meeting. “Because of the diversity of the states and the lack of straightforward proportionality of their populations and their electoral votes, opinion polling can be a challenge for presidential elections, as we have seen several times, especially in 2016.”
The meeting turned again to a new speaker, this one being research specialist Briony Smith. Smith explained the use of polls in the election process, and how inaccuracies are most likely caused by people giving their opinion but not voting or websites that are biased towards a party.
After viewing examples of polls, attendees of the meeting were able to ask questions. Ayers was pleased to find out that this year’s number of attendees was one of the largest the library has seen.
“In the Zoom culture of remote offerings, I was pleased to see 42 concurrent participants,” Ayers said. “Today when I checked, we’d had another 45 viewings on YouTube. That’s the largest turnout we’ve ever had for this annual event. The technology actually serves to make it more accessible, when the pandemic would have cut our numbers to 15 if we had held it in the library classroom like previous programs.”
