West Valley High School students in Fairbanks participated in a Kids Voting event Monday.
The event was hosted at the high school’s library, where students came during their history classes, or on their own time, to cast an anonymous electronic ballot in the races for Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly and School Board .
“We set it up this year where we put the bank of computers on the side of the wall and then we put eight Chromebooks in the middle,” said West Valley Librarian Cheryl Benedix, explaining that students signed in at the entrance to the library, where they received a voting number to access their ballot.“We have a list of their names so that we can kind of keep track,” Benedix said, saying students do not have to vote in every race.“It’s really important because it gets the kids involved,” Benedix said about the event. “There’s a lot of talk in a lot of the global studies classes about what their vote means, you know, and how important it is to get out and vote.”“I just think it’s important to know the information about these candidates and know who to vote for,” he said.“I don’t really understand why voting polls are so low, because information is easy to find,” he added, saying that when evaluating candidates, he prioritizes issues of inclusiveness in race, gender and age. Shyla Boe, also a senior, said that she mostly focuses on school board candidates, particularly how they handle budgeting. She voted for candidates who felt the same way she did about improving the school. “I feel like we do put our money somewhere else, that we don’t put towards schools or students at all, or education, because we lost a lot of teachers in the last year,” Boe explained.“I think for the Borough it was a lot clearer. There were some people that I strongly disagreed with in their stances and their beliefs, which is totally okay, so that decision was easy. For the school board, I think it was slightly difficult. I feel that a lot of the answers were similar to each other or were dodging the questions and not fully answering them,” Simpson explained.“It gives kind of a basis of understanding of how the system’s going to work, how the ballots work, how the voting works, registration,” she said. Simpson argued that voting provides a broad spectrum of opinion, allowing people’s voices to be heard. “Instead of having small groups that all are concentrated and believe in the same thing and all vote the same way, having people who are from different groups and have different understandings of how the world works is really important,” she said.Results in all but one contested race came out differently from the borough’s unofficial results as of Thursday, withLIVE: Governor issues disaster declaration as powerful storm batters Western Alaska‘He was a free spirit’: Alaska climber dies in fall on Yosemite’s El CapitanAlaska Rock Gym hosts memorial for deceased climberAdventure awaits at Rediscover Downtown Day
Kids Voting Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly School Board Benedix Simpson Boe Lassey
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