Summarizing our Project for Dr. Maxwell

Author: Celena Sabillon | Major: History, Political Science, African and African American Studies | Semester: Fall 2023

Hello Honors Arkansas! My name is Celena Sabillon and I’m triple majoring in Political Science, African and African American Studies, and History with double minors in Philosophy and Legal Studies. (it’s not as bad as it sounds!) For this project, I worked within a team and with my mentors, Dr. Hancox and Dr. Popp, in the Fall 2023 semester to create a website that makes information about the voting process more accessible in order to increase voter turnout among college-aged Americans.

I was brought onto the team by Dr. Hancox after discussing a new online class over voting rights that would include students each honors college across the state. Throughout the duration of the class, each college would individually conduct research for their own projects related to voting to present at the end of the year. Our team was tasked with creating a platform that would simplify the voting process for young adults to encourage them to vote by Dr. Angie Maxwell. Early on, we learned that this would be a difficult task. While in the beginning stages of our project, we focused on recording the differences in legislation over inperson voting, absentee voting, early voting, voter registration, and transferring registration for each of the 75 counties in Arkansas. During this process we learned that for a lot of counties, finding voting information and sorting it was difficult. So, we met with Washington County’s county clerk and election commissioner to learn more about what specific legislation was the same throughout each county, what was different, and what we needed to know from each county clerk. We ended up finding out that each county is required to post updated information each election cycle, whether it be online or in the newspaper, and that this information was already compiled into another website- VoterView.

With this new knowledge and half of the semester left, we ceased our research compiling county data and pivoted to compiling data from the top five states of where out-of-state students are from here at the university. We also decided to limit our scope to focus on University of Arkansas students and come back to broadening the site for other students later on. At the half-way point of the semester, we continued to work on the site in terms of design and how we would set it up. Here’s where we encountered one of the biggest problems within our project. Only one of our team members was familiar with programming while the rest of us were not so, a great amount of the site building was left to them. We decided that creating a Sharepoint instead would be a great stepping stone for the project since it does not require advance programming skills, is a free resource from the university, and would allow each team member to help work on the site.

We completed the Sharepoint (which is live now) and it currently has voting information for each county in Arkansas and from five other states. This Sharepoint breaks down the data we compiled to make it more digestible for those who are not familiar with the process in hopes of educating and empowering them to use their voice by voting. We did this by creating a “decision-tree” or an assessment that gages where a student is in the voting process and automatically gives them the resources they need to get ready to vote. In the future, we plan on conducting surveys to receive feedback on the Sharepoint to implement into an app that encompasses more students here at the university and eventually all students!