With the 2024 presidential election nearly upon us, the stakes have never been higher. And while the national contest is getting the most airtime, elections on the state and local level can be just as consequential. After all, the way elected officials govern has a direct and often sizeable impact on citizens’ everyday lives. This election season, students at the University of Vermont (UVM) are playing a crucial role in helping provide important information to voters, both locally and on a national scale.

It will all come to a head on Election Day (November 5th). That’s when 120 Delehanty Hall—home of UVM’s Center for Community News (CCN)—will be transformed into a university-wide election hub. The activity happening within will be part election viewing party, part dynamic working session, with students convening to discuss, write, and file election-focused stories and results that will impact voters near and far.

Here’s a snapshot of what the students will be up to:

Associated Press 2024 Election Team

About a dozen UVM students will be among the roughly 1,000 students nationwide who will be acting as Vote Entry Operators for the Associated Press (AP), an independent global news organization. Once hired and trained, they will be tasked with inputting vote totals as results come in from cities and counties across the country and will work both on Election Night and during the following days if there’s a need.

“This work is extremely important, as the AP is usually the first to announce election results around the world,” says Meg Little Reilly, managing director at CCN, which has played a major role in helping recruit students across the country for this effort. “CCN has helped spread the word through our newsletter, conference presentations, and reaching out to faculty members in our network,” she says. “It’s important to fill these spots since the students play such a critical role.”

Local News Coverage Through the Community News Service

Throughout the fall semester, the 16 students in Scott Finn’s intro section of the Community News Service (CNS) internship course have been working with local papers—in locations ranging from neighboring Winooski to the farther-flung Hardwick and Randolph—to profile candidates, talk about different aspects of the voting process, and provide information to community members about how and where to vote. “It’s important for students to understand elections at the state and local levels, not just national,” Finn says. “They have a role to play in civic engagement by providing practical stories about how citizens can participate in the election.”

The students working on The Winooski News, for example, created a flyer to post around the downtown. In a savvy nod to the diversity of the population, it has both tear-aways with the city clerk’s contact information and a QR code directing community members to an online article, “Here’s How to Vote in Winooski,” that includes a map to the polling place and details about such things as home ballot drop-offs and voting rules for non-citizens. Other students created a how-to-vote Instagram graphic— think helpful tips all wrapped up in an easy visual—to distribute to several local papers.

On Election Day, the students will fan out to do person-on-the-street interviews near some of the polling places covered by the local papers with which they’re partnered. The goal? For many, it will be to engage voters in conversation and collect information about their voting experiences that can then be integrated into the reporting for the town paper.

For others, the focus will be on the people who make the voting process possible. “While we’re still figuring out the logistics, we plan to talk to poll workers in a couple of different towns,” says student reporter Spencer Robb, a senior English major who has been working with the Journal Opinion, the local paper in Bradford, Vermont. “For example, there’s one polling place located in a school gymnasium, so we want to find out what that means for the students.”

Tova Brickley ‘25, another student reporter majoring in English, has been learning about a similar issue while working to support the Waterbury Roundabout. “I just finished writing a story looking into why the elementary school is closing to students while the town uses it as an in-person polling place,” she says. “They’ve used it for elections before while the students were there, but some people in the town have become concerned about the increasing threat of gun violence at polling places.”

Finn’s students won’t be alone, either. More than half a dozen interns from the advanced section of the CNS internship course, taught by Justin Trombly, will also be busy at and around the polls, taking photographs and uncovering election-related stories to write up and send to a wide variety of local news outlets.

And while all this work is creating myriad benefits for the voters—and, indeed, the democratic process—in all these towns, the students are gaining something, too. “Students bring a fresh perspective to the communities while, at the same time, learning about what’s going on at the local level in Vermont,” Finn says. “Journalism is a hugely useful tool to learn about the world and how to communicate. Nothing teaches you more about a place than having to report on that place.”

Supporting Student Election Reporting Across the Country

The Center for Community News may be based here in the tiny state of Vermont, but its influence is felt across the entire United States. In addition to recruiting students for the AP, CCN has been providing guidance and resources through their Elections and Democracy Reporting Initiative to faculty at universities nationwide who are leading student election reporting programs and classes. They are also collecting stories written by students across the country in the Election Hub of the National Community News Wire.

And they’ve still got an eye on their home state, too. Recently, CCN published an interactive election map, updated in real time, showing how many people have voted in every town in Vermont. To help spread the word, CNS student journalists wrote a story about it.

Fair elections depend on an informed electorate, but it can be hard for citizens to find the accurate, pertinent information they need to fill that role. That’s why it’s so important that UVM students are stepping up in such a big way to educate and support those voters. It’s a remarkable example of how small-scale, grassroots involvement in our democracy can make a huge difference in the futures of both our state and our country.