News
vElection grants real life education for students
Scott Wagar
11/13/2012
Election day was an education for Lori Erickson’s second grade class when they came with their teacher to her precinct and observed her as she went through the voting process.
Erickson’s second grade class originated their sojourn to Bottineau’s polling place a week before the election when Bottineau’s mayor, Ben Aufforth, came to Central School and visited with the second grade class about the working progress of an election.
“Mayor Ben came to visit all of the second graders on October 27 where the students asked him questions about his duties being the mayor, how the city works, what it took to run for office and question about his life,” Erickson said. “Mayor Ben and I discussed the possibility of my students witnessing actual voting. He set it up with Bottineau County Auditor Lisa Herbel for our class to come to the courthouse.”
On Tuesday, Erickson and her students came to the court house where they were introduced to Herbel who spoke to them about how the election is conducted within a poll.
From there, the young scholars followed Erickson to the registration table, into the voting booth room and allowed one of her students, Morgan Wittmayer, to place her ballot into the electromechanical optical scanning machine, which tabulated the individuals Erickson voted for on her ballot.
Once the students witnessed the voting process, they went back to their classroom and held their own mock election, which had an outcome that matched the voters on election day.
“We held our own election with kids having to present a registration card, sign in on a voter’s list, vote in a booth and return their ballots in a ballot box,” Erickson said. “We voted on the President of the United States, state senator and after a nominating process and campaign teams, we voted on a class president. Our classroom winners were Barack Obama, Heidi Heitkamp and Joss Olson.”
Through the process, Erickson stated that her students gained great insight about politics, campaigning and the election, itself.
“We spent a lot of time learning about the election process, terminology, and how Character Counts works into an election; or, as many students have discovered through campaign ads, how Character Counts does not work with an election.
‘Mudslinging’ was a very popular term we learned,” she said. “I really enjoyed our election unit and listening to the students talk about the debates, the political ads and who they would vote for if they were 18 years old. They have some great ideas about how to run our country. Who knows, maybe some of them will end up in a political office some day.”