Seniors Cooper Davis and Alec Sumner worked together to put on the mock election and conduct voter outreach for their Civitas senior projects. Freshmen were the targeted audience of the senior project because they had never done the mock election before.

The mock election allowed over 1,200 students to vote on three races for candidacy and four propositions which will be on the Nov. ballot. The results showed students elected Gavin Newsom as Governor, Ed Hernandez as Lieutenant Governor, and Alex Padilla as Secretary of State. Races demonstrated the common opinions of the student body. One proposition won with over 79.9 percent of voters in favor.

The propositions that were passed are Prop. 3 and Prop. 12. Prop. 3 is a bond to pay for water and environment projects and Prop. 12 is the banning of animal confinement.

The process allows for students to have experience with voting before they participate in normal elections once they are old enough. Seniors that are 18 will be able to vote in the upcoming midterm elections.

While the material voted on may be dry, Davis’ goal was the inform all new voters at Rio.

“Some of the kids were more engaged than others obviously,” said Davis. “It depended class to class. A couple asked questions afterwards and seemed actually engaged, while some didn’t, which is sort of what I expected.”
McKenna Hubbard is a freshman that participated in the voter outreach as well as the mock election. Although new to the process, she thought that voter education was important.

“I think it’s important because you want to be able to be successful in the future and I personally want to make my own decisions and so I want to be able to know what I’m voting for,” Hubbard said.

Senior Alec Sumner conducted the election and had to get the voting booths and materials.

Sumner said, “My senior project was advocating voter awareness, so my actual event was organizing a mock election for the whole school. The County Office of Elections and Voter Registration helped me put the project together.”

Students that were 16 or older could register to vote after submitting their mock election ballots. This means that once they turn 18 and can vote in real elections, they will be pre-approved to vote.

“I think that the mock election went great; we registered 108 students to vote that weren’t previously registered,” Sumner said.

Senior Ben Baker will be voting in the November elections as a registered democrat.

“I am planning on getting ready for the November election by watching a lot of news; I don’t limit myself to one side of news. I like to see both sides of the story because I think it’s arrogant not to be educated on what both sides think,” Baker said.

The mock election is a Civitas senior project that is passed down every year, so the event will continue on in Rio’s future.

I think just about every kid at the school attended and it went pretty smoothly.

Everyone seemed to know what they were doing. I only talked to freshman classes. When I reached out to the different teachers they said that the freshman were the ones that needed the most help just because all of the other grades had done the mock election before.