Army Pfc. Carlynn Knaak
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba A Joint Task Force Guantanamo Trooper fills out an absentee ballot for the upcoming presidential election, Oct. 8, 2008. Every JTF Trooper has the opportunity to register and vote while serving on U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay via absentee ballot. JTF Guantanamo conducts safe, humane, legal and transparent care and custody of detained enemy combatants, including those convicted by military commission and those ordered released. The JTF conducts intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination for the protection of detainees and personnel working in JTF Guantanamo facilities and in support of the Global War on Terror. JTF Guantanamo provides support to the Office of Military Commissions, to law enforcement and to war crimes investigations. The JTF conducts planning for and, on order, responds to Caribbean mass migration operations. (JTF Guantanamo photo by Army Pfc. Carlynn Knaak) UNCLASSIFIED Cleared for public release. For additional information contact JTF Guantanamo PAO 011-5399-3589; DSN 660-3589 www.jtfgtmo.southcom.mil
Voting in college can be stressful. Students have a lot of things to worry about, finishing
papers, writing labs, studying for exams, and getting everything together to vote may not
be your top priority. Many college students are even more discouraged from voting
because it can pose such challenges. These challenges only increase when things do not
work the way they should. When you go to college in a state you are not registered in,
there is more opportunity for things to not go how they should.
While many students at UNH live locally enough that they can go home to vote, even
more do not. If you have to fill out an absentee ballot for the presidential election it can
get pretty stressful fairly quickly. Especially when your absentee ballot mysteriously
disappears.
When you spend three days and many hours on the phone with your local voter
registration office only to find out that your ballot had been sent weeks ago, it does not
encourage you to vote. When you go to the mailroom and they do not even seem to care
that you may now not be able to vote, it really doesn’t make your day better.
Students here trust the mailroom with a variety of different things, from annual holiday
cards to expensive care packages to important documents; they should be more
organized. Losing mail should be a much less common occurrence than it currently is.
Occasionally it still happens, mail gets lost, and that is very understandable.
What is not understandable is when the people, who could have made the mistake, do
absolutely nothing to correct it. Not even an apology. A certain degree of care or concern
should be seen when someone tells you that you should’ve received their absentee ballot
two weeks ago. A certain level of effort should be exerted in a search attempt. Instead,
when I went to the mailroom I was greeted with the nonchalant response of, “ask them
to send it again.” Four days before the election. Helpful.
Millennials are the generation to change the world. Isn’t that what they tell us? We have
the numbers and ideals to seriously change the way the system functions. If we vote. Yet,
when it is increasingly difficult to actually cast a ballot, less and less millennials will do
so. When ballots are lost, and students, who have a long list of things to accomplish,
need to spend hours trying to figure out how to fix it, they give up. They do not vote.
They do not have a voice in the government. The next time a mailroom loses someone’s
voice in their government, the least they could do is apologize.