Baala Shakya, Contributing Photographer
On Election Day, Yale undergraduate and graduate students turned out to vote in New Haven, in City Hall and the wards that encompass Yale’s residential colleges — 1 and 22 — and that house off-campus students.
While some students chose to cast their ballot in Connecticut and register in advance, others fell back on same-day registration in Connecticut due to complications with their absentee ballots or other voting methods in their home states.
“It’s really important that no matter what, we show our politicians that we do in fact care about voting,” Aaron Combs ’28 said.
Students who same-day registered did so in City Hall, where they also cast their ballots in the Aldermanic Chamber.
In the afternoon, at the Elm Street New Haven Free Public Library, the polling location for Ward 1. Within a few minutes, several students showed up with questions to clarify where they should register and vote. The confusion mainly arises from how Yale students are split between Wards 1 and 22 depending on where they reside on campus, Alder Kiana Flores ’25 explained.
By the end of Tuesday, 101 people had turned out to vote in Ward 1, according to José Resto, the polling moderator. Eighty-seven votes were cast for Vice President Kamala Harris and nine were cast for former President Donald Trump.
In the 2020 general election, 173 people voted in Ward 1. The 2024 turnout numbers do not include the more than 9,000 votes cast in early voting across the city — the first time early voting has been implemented in Connecticut during a general election.
Resto believed that most of the voters who showed up were Yale students. Ward 1 encompasses most of Yale’s residential colleges and parts of Chapel and College streets. Some Yalies, mostly graduate students, also voted in Ward 7, Ward 8 and Ward 22.
Students motivated by civic duty
Many students eligible to vote for the first time this year were motivated to show up and exercise their civic duty. Combs called the right to vote a “privilege.”
Mark Akladious ’28 and Maria Guerrero GRD ’29 both missed the deadline to vote in their home states of New York and Florida, but they showed up for same-day registration to vote in Connecticut.
Though Akladious expressed dissatisfaction with both candidates on the ballot, he still wanted to exercise his right to vote. He disliked “Trump primarily because of who he is and Harris because of who she’s not.” He cited Harris’ lack of specificity on policies. On the other hand, he said that Trump holds outspoken views, a lot of which he criticized.
Combs also wished both candidates provided more “clarification” on their policies.
Guerrero said she had been waiting to register at City Hall for nearly an hour. She voted for Harris.
“I want to make history,” she said. “I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history by saying that I didn’t vote.”
Yale Votes walked over 150 students to the polls
Yale Votes: A Student Initiative, a nonpartisan student organization dedicated to increasing voter turnout, has ramped up its operations in recent months. In the leadup to Election Day, they held watch parties for the presidential and vice presidential debates and registered students to vote.
“I think that because of a lot of our outreach efforts and our tabling efforts, people are reminded that they need to either register to vote or request their absentee ballot,” Vice President Julia Lin ’26 said. “That sometimes is really hard to remember when you’re so busy with life at Yale.”
Yale Votes led 65 Yalies on walks to the polls on Tuesday, and another 99 to vote early in the days leading up to the election, according to estimates from the organization’s president Alex Moore ’26. As City Hall did not hand out voting stickers, Yale Votes distributed upwards of six thousand custom “I voted” stickers to Yalies and New Haveners.
Moore said that the two most common issues he saw on Election Day were students not receiving their absentee ballots in time and students deciding it would be easier to vote in person on Election Day than to complete complicated remote registration processes.
Clelia Poujade ’28 moved from Illinois to Tennessee just before arriving at Yale and did not know how to switch her registration. She credited Yale Votes with guiding her through the logistics of changing her registration to Connecticut on Election Day.
Poujade, who voted Democratic across the ballot, said that issues that motivated her were LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, gun violence and climate change — in line with dozens of other students in the lead-up to the election. She said she was glad to find a way to vote in the first election for which she was eligible.
Thomasin Schmults ’26 applied for an absentee ballot in Massachusetts, but it did not arrive in time. On the morning of Election Day, she searched online for whether she could switch her registration to Connecticut from another state same-day and found the answer only in an email from Yale Votes. After seeing that she could, Schmults headed to City Hall at around 8:00 a.m.
Approximately 1.8 million people voted in Connecticut in 2020.
Baala Shakya and Sophia Stone contributed reporting.
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JOSIE REICH
Josie Reich covers the president’s office. She previously reported on admissions and financial aid. Originally from Washington, DC, she is a junior in Davenport College majoring in American Studies.
LILY BELLE POLING
Lily Belle Poling covers housing and homelessness and climate and the environment. She is also a production and design editor and lays out the weekly print. Originally from Montgomery, Alabama, she is a sophomore in Branford College majoring in Global Affairs and English.
