On Nov. 8, 2006, Student Life published a staff editorial (“University failed students in 2006 voting”) decrying the University’s failure to accommodate students who had voted on the South 40 during the 2004 presidential election and had since moved off campus.

In 2006, Student Life found that the University had mailed change of address postcards to upperclassmen who had voted as South 40 residents in 2004 and since moved off campus—to their old postboxes on the South 40, boxes that no longer belonged to these students. When trying to vote in 2006, the aforementioned students were surprised to learn that they would have had to change their addresses with the St. Louis Board of Elections in order to vote without the use of a provisional ballot.

The editorial written in 2006 called the University out on not properly enfranchising students, especially following an email from the Chancellor encouraging the entire community to vote. It was particularly hypocritical, the 2006 editorial board wrote, for the University to have encouraged student voting and then to have failed in its execution.

Four years later, the administration neither properly encouraged nor properly executed the enfranchisement of Washington University students.

Efforts from the community to encourage student voting, we feel, were lackluster. The College Democrats handed out doughnuts, and the Gephardt Institute co-sponsored a drive with College Dems to encourage students to register to vote in Missouri. However, the elections were ill publicized on campus, standing in marked contrast to the fervor surrounding the 2008 presidential elections.

Students should have known to change their voting addresses, or at least to check voting policies online. However, the University should realize that most students will forget about voting until the last minute and take initiative in facilitating voting on campus.

The apathy surrounding midterm elections at Washington University is unforgivable. Many of this year’s elections were tightly contested, including the U.S. House race and Proposition B’s restrictions on puppy mills. Proposition A passed in Missouri, and this measure could very well take St. Louis’ already-stretched budget into a permanent red zone.

As inhabitants of St. Louis—temporary inhabitants who will, without fail, retain permanent ties to our alma mater and to the city it calls home—Proposition A, in particular, is something we should have been given reason to care about. And, precisely because we are temporary inhabitants, the administration has a responsibility to tell us that ballot issues like this one are important.

However, regardless of whether or not Washington University encourages us to vote in midterm elections, the administration, at the very least, has a responsibility to tell us how to properly do so. In 2010, as in 2006, the University failed to adequately execute the mailing of change of address cards.

The student body received an email from Student Union Vice President of Public Relations Cody Katz at 1:28 p.m. on Election Day with a link to click so that students could find their polling place. Katz’s effort, though noble, was a classic case of too little, too late.

Giving students instructions for voting should not be the responsibility of Student Union in the first place. Information about how to register to vote in St. Louis County, as well as information about how to change one’s address, should be included in Orientation programming so that new students immediately become a political element of the local community. Further information should e-mailed out to all students over the summer before midterm elections, giving them ample time to change their addresses.

The University left unread postcards in unchecked mailboxes in 2006, and it appears to have done the same this year. We can only hope that this particular editorial will be read, and that more students will be empowered to vote in 2014.