There’s a deeply ingrained myth that voting from New York state makes no difference because it’s a deep-blue state, but that simply is not the case this year in Binghamton.
Binghamton is located in Congressional District NY-19, one of New York’s seven congressional “swing districts” that helped Republicans gain control of the House of Representatives by electing Marc Molinaro in the 2022 midterms. Activists on campus and throughout our state traveled to Pennsylvania in 2022 and made text and phone calls to Wisconsin and Michigan to get out the vote in midwestern “swing states,” while New York redistricting combined with the deep apathy of the blue-state voting mindset allowed Molinaro to win NY-19 by a margin of just under 4,500 votes and Republicans to secure a House majority.
Meanwhile, there are around 16,000 undergraduate students living on campus at Binghamton University and Cornell University combined, just two of many colleges and universities in NY-19. Yet, fewer than 750 students voted in the 2022 midterms on Election Day from Binghamton’s on-campus polling place — about 20 percent of eligible voters.
College students from upstate New York and Long Island have the voting potential to deliver the House back to Democratic control this year, setting the stage to prevent unscrupulous challenges to the election results brought by Donald Trump or the “Stop the Steal” crowd that attempted to use the House to circumvent the democratic process in 2020. A Democratic House will be an essential partner for a President Kamala Harris to enact a legislative agenda or an indispensable backstop against a second Trump administration’s Project 2025.
This crucial election season, Binghamton students need to exercise their considerable political power and register to vote from their campus addresses, even if they were previously registered from home addresses before the registration deadline this Saturday, Oct. 26.
Binghamton students can register or re-register to vote at their campus addresses online at studentvote.info/binghamton and get campus-specific voting information, including where to vote when early voting starts at the end of the week.
It’s not an understatement to say that Binghamton alone can profoundly impact the future of the country, and we are all depending on BU students to lead the way forward.
Amanda Aaron is the founder of Swing the Vote, a grassroots political group dedicated to helping college students register and vote.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.