‘Stop making excuses and get out the vote,’ World Wrestling Entertainment superstars and other representatives encouraged Massachusetts citizens yesterday at the Smackdown Your Vote rally at Northeastern University.
Despite their late arrival, Kane, The Hurricane, Al Snow and Spike Dudley joined forces with former governor and current Northeastern professor Michael Dukakis and members of Northeastern’s student government to urge a crowd of mostly Northeastern students to get out and vote on Election Day.
Al Snow energetically called for young people to fulfill their responsibilities as a citizen. ‘For every right, you have a responsibility,’ he said. ‘If you don’t exercise your responsibility, you’re part of the problem.’
To many, professional wrestlers might seem to be an odd choice as spokespeople for a campaign to encourage voting, but to event organizers, it was a natural selection. As a partner of the Youth Vote Coalition, the WWE is seen as the celebrity voice needed to publicize the issue of voting.
‘[The WWE] is committed to get the youth to vote’, said Raegan Traux, a Massachusetts Student Public Interest Group (MASSPirg) employee and volunteer at the rally.
Organizers took the stage in front of an enthusiastic crowd armed with cameras and dressed in WWE T-shirts. Brian Tanner, the event organizer from the Youth Vote Coalition, got the crowd pumped up for the event.
‘This is the final chance to get educated and motivated,’ Tanner said. ‘Voting is the beginning of a whole new world.’
Richard Schwabacher, the Student Body President at Northeastern called upon his fellow students to break the current trend of low voter turnout among young people.
‘We are not making enough noise as 18- to 25-year-olds,’ Schwabacher said. ‘We can send a message now, our vote does count!’
Dukakis took the stage and echoed Schwabacher’s sentiments, imploring young people to ‘get out there’ and calling the low voter turnout for 18- to 25-year-olds ‘distressing.’
While many young people feel that this election has nothing to do with them, Dukakis countered that argument with what he called ‘the four fundamental issues of this campaign:’ the economy, health care, educational opportunities for all and affordable housing.
Dukakis challenged young people in the audience, saying, ‘If those issues aren’t relevant to you, then I am on the wrong planet. Don’t let anyone tell you this election is irrelevant to young people.’
Though many students agreed that this event did encourage them to vote, many, like Dennis McCarthy and Simon Pan of Northeastern, just happened to be stopping by or were there to see the wrestlers.
‘I just stopped by on my way to class,’ Pan said. ‘But it does kind of make me want to get out and vote.’
The crowd waited patiently for the late-arriving WWE crew. When they finally arrived, flashbulbs lit up the room and the surprisingly small crowd let out its loudest cheers of the afternoon.
After a bit of joking around on the part of the wrestlers, the WWE got down to business. Each focused on the importance of voting and the power and responsibility that comes with it.
‘If you want to tell very powerful people what to do, get out and vote,’ Kane said.
Spike Dudley added, ‘If you don’t take part in your society, you have no right to complain.’
Since 2000, the Smackdown Your Vote organization and its partners have been on the mission of encouraging young people across the country to vote. Over the past eight weeks alone, the WWE and its partners have registered 150,000 voters for the upcoming election. Yesterday’s rally was the final event of the 2002 Smackdown Your Vote! Campaign.