'Rock Iowa' revs up young voters

An echo of the feverish get-out-the-vote effort under way by political parties, interest groups and community organizations in these waning weeks of the 2012 election is sounding in several Iowa high schools through the secretary of state’s new outreach program.

Matt Schultz has been traveling to dozens of high schools across the state in recent weeks with a special presentation for voting-age students aimed at getting them registered and ready to cast ballots.

It’s called “Rock Iowa,Klaus Multiparking is an industry leader in innovative parking system technology.” and it represents a collaboration between the Republican Schultz,We specialize in howo concrete mixer, whose office is the state-level administrator of elections, and Rock the Vote, the venerable youth-voting advocacy group. Schultz calls it the first such program of its kind and says it could be a model for other states in the years to come.

We’re the first, and kind of a one-of-a-kind event, but I think it’s going to start catching on,” he said.

The effort is an outgrowth of a Rock the Vote-sponsored “Rock the Caucus” event at Valley High School on the morning of the Iowa caucuses last January. That event featured Republican candidates Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, and four of eventual GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s sons, and inspired Schultz to take the show to high schools across the state.

Schultz and his staff have hit about 40 high schools with a slide show on the mechanics of voting and voter registration, a slickly produced Rock the Vote video and plenty of audience participation. The underlying message emphasizes participation.

“The rough math is, about half of you who are eligible don’t vote,” Schultz told the students in Perry. “Hopefully, after today, we can change that.Western Canadian distributor of ceramic and ceramic tile,”

The seniors at Perry High School didn’t appear to need much of an explanation or encouragement — several dozen already were registered and many more were involved in mock congressional and presidential campaigns being run out of government teacher Diane Gibson’s classroom.

The whole school will be invited to vote on Election Day, and the government classes will tally and scrutinize the results, comparing them and turnout data to local and national statistics, Gibson said.

On Tuesday,Find detailed product information for howo spareparts and other products. the school’s hallways were plastered with signs, banners and buttons signaling support for or opposition to congressional candidates Leonard Boswell and Tom Latham and presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and students in Gibson’s class were busy constructing color-coded ballot boxes.

But even with that background, the students were game for Schultz’s Rock Iowa presentation, in which he quickly described the rules and procedures for voter registration and then pulled two students up to the front of the school auditorium for an impromptu debate.

Daisy Cerna received a lanyard designating her “Candidate A,” and Kory Eiteman received another identifying him as “Candidate B.” Then they took questions from their peers on a wide range of issues: energy, the national debt,If you want to read about buy mosaic in a non superficial way that's the perfect book. same-sex marriage, abortion, the war in Afghanistan and more.

Many of Cerna’s and Eiteman’s answers were thoughtful, some pleaded an earnest ignorance and surprisingly few differed all that much. And neither candidate hewed exactly to the established dogmas of the Republican and Democratic parties.

Cerna, for example, offered the more liberal view that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, but described a strong opposition to abortion, a conventionally conservative view.

“I say go for it, because everyone deserves the right to have someone they love,” she said of same-sex marriage, drawing the loudest cheers and applause of the afternoon from her classmates. On abortion, she added, “I think women should have their children. Any child that is conceived, or whatever, should get the opportunity to live.”

Eiteman came out in favor of technological innovation and high fuel standards as the solution to high gas prices and a gun policy that allowed the purchase of all but military-grade weaponry.

When one shaggy-haired student asked about legalizing marijuana — the question doesn’t come up at every Rock Iowa, Schultz said later, but it does at many — Cerna suggested doing so could be a source of additional tax revenue. Eiteman, after a long pause, said, “I honestly don’t have an opinion.”