My research team and I presenting our final project to Dr. Angie Maxwell
Author: Emma Mitchell | Major: Psychology and Agricultural Business Pre-Law | Semester: Fall 2023
My name is Emma Mitchell, and I am a senior honors student obtaining degrees from both the Fulbright and Bumpers Colleges. After earning degrees in Psychology and Agricultural Business, I plan to attend law school in the fall of 2024. I just finished up a semester of research working with Dr. Louise Hancox, the Director of Career Innovation for the Honors College, and Dr. Jennie Popp, the Associate Dean of the Honors College.
In my current research project, my research team and I explored the voting system within Arkansas and its neighboring states to create an user-friendly site to aid students with the process of voting. As we began gathering data, we found that many college students do not vote, whether that be because they believe the process is too time-consuming or because the process looks to be too complicated. We worked to collect and sift through the wordy information so other students don’t have to. This left us with a simple site that asked students questions to guide them to the information about voting that was relevant to them.
Throughout my college experience, I have consistently searched for elective classes that would provide a different educational experience than my major classes, but that would also allow me to explore a topic that I was interested in. As I was choosing classes for the Fall 2023 semester, I emailed Dr. Popp because I was ideally searching for an honors course to take as an elective. She shared with me the plans for her and Dr. Hancox’s Voting Rights course. Their goal was to lead a research based class to explore the voting habits of college students. I knew immediately that it was a class I was interested in.
Beginning our class, we were tasked by Dr. Angie Maxwell to collect data on voting within Arkansas, specifically amongst college students, to create an app to guide students through the process of voting. We began gathering data on registering to vote, in-person voting on election day, absentee voting, and early voting, as well as the best place to find voting information within each county. Our original plan was to call the County Clerk for each of Arkansas’ 75 counties to obtain this information. As we conducted research, we learned that all of an individual’s information for voting could be found on a website called VoterView. This allowed us to shift our focus to begin working on the site, as well as collecting information on other neighboring states of Arkansas.
Ultimately, we were able to create a SharePoint site that leads students through a series of questions to guide them through their voting experience. All three of my team’s faculty mentors guided us tremendously within our research. They were there every step of the way to help us problem solve, guide us in next steps, and alert us to things we had not yet explored. It is through their guidance and the generous funding of the Honors College that we were able to create a successful site that is fully functioning. In the future, a few students from our team will continue this research project to test our site with real students and troubleshoot various design issues in order to make voting as accessible to college students as possible.