By Laura Acuff, Opinion Editor
Essence of Ebony promoted voter registration Saturday with its Rock the Vote event.
Byron Martin, senior psychology major from Mesquite, who helped with the event, said he estimated around 40 people registered to vote that night.
“I don’t think we were expecting that big of a number, but we were expecting as many as we could,” Martin said. “We still have forms left over. If anybody else needs to vote, we have the forms but we were glad about the turnout.”
Scheduled to start at 5:30 p.m., the event actually began around 6:30 p.m. and featured a step performance by SHADES and vocal performers, including Alex Howard, Byron Martin and Anna Peters, said Essence of Ebony president Kenneth Dinkins, junior youth and family ministry major from Toledo, Ohio.
In addition to live entertainment, food was provided, and fliers also advertised fellowship and discussion, but Martin said the focus remained on voter registration.
“I think the biggest thing that prompted it was the fact that we just want everybody to be able to vote,” Martin said. “Sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, I have to go home to vote,’ or, ‘I’m not going to be able to vote because I’m not going to be at home.’ Well hey, you can vote in Taylor County too. We always want to be helping in that fact.”
Dinkins said the idea to sponsor an event to register voters came from other local organizations.
“It was kind of started by an idea by the Young Democrats,” Dinkins said. “They had been doing registration for people to get registered to vote, and it was something we felt that we needed to do, and it was also kind of the work that we were doing. One of the local churches here was doing registration too.”
A national organization called Rock the Vote also strives to use “music, popular culture and new technologies to engage and incite young people to register and vote in every election” according to its Web site, www.rockthevote.com, but Dinkins said the Essence of Ebony event was affiliated neither with the organization nor any single candidate.
