CARIBOU, Maine — Last week’s mock election at the Caribou High School wasn’t real — but the experience was.
That’s why junior Maddy Staples, election chairman, is pretty excited that the school had nearly 75 percent participation.
“Almost every junior and senior will be able to vote for the Presidential election in two years,” Staples said. “We tried to make it as real as possible because we want people to be prepared — and it was just kind of fun,” she added.
Staples spent the school day on Oct. 21 overseeing the election and she was very pleased with the turnout.
“Normal elections are maybe 10 percent of the population — I’m almost positive it was 75 percent of the school,” Staples said with a grin. “We had a huge turnout.”
Multiple times, however, Staples heard students say that they didn’t want to vote because they didn’t know what was going on.
Staples assured those students it was OK to skip any of the questions or candidate races that they weren’t comfortable with.
“It is OK to vote. If you have an opinion on only one question on the whole ballot, you can go in and fill out that question,” Staples described.
While the two-year Student Council representative volunteered to be the chairman for the election, she was more interested in helping her classmates understand the election process than she was interested in the voting results.
But one Caribou alumnae was pretty interested in the results, as Maine Senator Susan Collins (R-Caribou) called Caribou history teacher Kenneth Atcheson to find out the mock election results.
That phone call put a big smile on Staples’ face.
“It’s kind of different,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect an actual senator to call our teacher and say ‘what were the mock election results?’”
Winning the ballot for Caribou students were incumbent Sen. Susan Collins with 63 percent, incumbent Governor Paul LePage with 43.8 percent and Bruce Poliquin for Congress with 46.5 percent. Students voted no on Question 1 with 67.2 percent, yes on Question 2 with 64.8 percent, yes on Question 3 with 62 percent, yes on Question 4 with 67 percent, no on Question 5 with 52 percent, yes on Question 6 with 77 percent and no on Question 7 with 51 percent.
The results weren’t that shocking for Staples due to the range of opinions she knows her classmates have.
“I wasn’t really surprised at all because people get their opinions from their parents normally, or from the news,” she explained.
Staples may not be old enough to vote in this election, but she’s going to watch those Nov. 4 results pretty closely — particularly to see how many adults voted compared to how many students.
