By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS, Associated Press WriterSat Dec 29, 3:36 AM ET
Kenyon College student Ann Shikany couldn't wait to vote for the first time. When she finally got the chance, she waited. And waited.
Shikany stood, sat, ate and napped in line for more than 10 hours in 2004 in this college town, home to the longest voting lines in the country. She finally cast her vote for Democrat John Kerry over President Bush about 1 a.m.
"We all agreed that everyone should stay," Shikany recalled recently. "That was very important and kind of inspiring."
Instead of turning her off, the experience galvanized her and others at Kenyon College, a private liberal arts school of 1,600 students. Shikany, 21, is now a senior who has voted in off-year elections since and is looking forward to voting again in the 2008 presidential election.
There are no outward reminders of the voting marathon at the quiet, tree-lined campus that sits on a hill surrounded by farmland in central Ohio. Students active in politics say that day's legacy is more interest in voting rights.
"I do notice an insistence that not just your vote but everyone's vote gets counted, that no one is denied their right to vote," said Evan McLaren, 23, a senior from Harrisburg, Pa., and president of the college's Libertarian Party chapter.
Kenyon students pay much closer attention today to the administration of elections, said Matthew Segal, 21, a senior and a Democrat from Chicago.
Segal had perhaps the most visible response to 2004, when the number of young voters spiked over the 2000 election. He formed a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization, Student Association for Voter Empowerment, to increase the number of young people who vote.
The group held an event in December at the University of Iowa featuring Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Segal, a sociology major, divides his time between his studies in Ohio and running SAVE in Washington. The organization has chapters at 23 colleges, including Kenyon.
"I feel as though my peers, at least in the senior class, when they go to vote they're watching out to make sure there's enough machines," Segal said. "They're watching out to make sure their registration goes through. They don't take the actual process for granted."
In Gambier, the process broke down when one of the two voting machines broke. By day's end a federal judge had authorized the use of paper ballots, but many students refused to use them, believing their votes wouldn't be counted.
Although the students traditionally had voted in their home states or cities, many registered to vote that year in Ohio, a swing state in an election that promised to be extremely close.
Measuring the effect of 2004 beyond the vigilance Segal describes is difficult. Last year, several students campaigned for Zack Space, a Democrat and 1983 Kenyon grad who seized an eastern Ohio congressional seat long held by the GOP.
In the Kenyon precinct, 652 people - almost all students - cast votes in that race, more than twice as many as in 2002, a comparable off-year election. But the turnout itself was a relatively low 39 percent of registered voters, not that much greater than the 35 percent turnout of 2002.
And no one can say whether a renewed interest in politics thanks to 2004 or Space's college ties contributed to the higher participation.
In a November column in the campus paper, The Kenyon Collegian, editor and senior Hannah Curran called Segal's organization one of the college's fastest-growing but least well-known groups. She also acknowledged that "Kenyon's political climate has cooled somewhat" since 2004.
McLaren, of the Libertarian Party, questions the long-term effect of that election. "We weren't traumatized on the one hand and we don't wear it as a badge of honor on our sleeve on the other," he said.
Most of the students in line in 2004 voted for Kerry, who lost the state to Bush by 2 percentage points, or fewer than 120,000 votes. Gaining Ohio's 20 electoral votes secured re-election for Bush, and the loss was painful for many who had stood in line for so long. Some put a partisan spin on the long lines, equating them with other voting problems around Ohio that year that many Democrats claimed were manufactured by Republicans.
"The feeling that someone was trying to restrict our voice has provided an impetus to get a lot more involved," said Sarah Cohen, a senior and president of Kenyon College Democrats.
Colin McGuire, president of the college's student GOP organization, questioned the sincerity of out-of-state students casting votes for Democrats in largely rural and Republican Knox County. Most students who are Republican tend to vote by absentee ballot in their home elections, feeling it's not their place to get involved in local politics, McGuire said.
But he added that Kenyon gained a reputation as a center of political thought and activism and called that a good thing, regardless of how people vote. He counts Cohen and Segal as friends.
"We're all on the same side, and we should all have the same goal of making this country a better place," said McGuire, of East Lansing, Mich.
The college intends to keep the memory of 2004 alive in part with a new center for the study of American democracy. The center will host conferences, sponsor lectures and classes and provide a Web site, pod casts and blogs, among other offerings.
Shikany hopes her generation can do more than turn out to vote in greater numbers. The Cincinnati native wants young people to be a moderating influence in today's divisive political climate.
"So many of the educated political elites have really diverged to one extreme side or the other," she said. "I hope we can change that and work toward the middle so we can get more effective policies and stop alienating middle of the road Americans."
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