Hampden Wants You, to Vote

Hampden residents and merchants are on a mission to get their neighbors to vote in this year’s municipal elections.

The Hampden Community Council, as well as some members of the Hampden Village Merchants Association, launched a voter registration drive this week.

“Obviously, the goal is to get every person in Hampden to register to vote that is eligible,” said George L. Peters Jr., a council board member.

Peters, who is a Patch contributor, said the drive is nonpartisan and not intended to benefit a particular candidate.  He said increasing the number of Hampden residents who vote helps increase the neighborhood’s influence with City Hall.

“The whole purpose of getting people to vote is so Hampden has a little more juice,” Peters said.

Genny Dill, a council board member, said she feels the registration drive is needed because many people in the neighborhood don’t vote. She said that's partly because of a concentration of younger  residents who tend not to go to the polls. But getting those residents registered is important to the neighborhood.

“The more voters you have in an area, the more attention is paid to that area,” Dill said.

Peters said  he hopes to gather enough volunteers to begin canvassing the neighborhood. But the organizers of the drive have also added an interesting twist. They’ll be using shops in the neighborhood’s shopping district to also register voters.   

When Peters approached Benn Ray, president of the Hampden Village Merchants Association, with the idea of using businesses to register voters Ray thought it made perfect sense.

"I don't know why nobody ever thought about it before," Ray said.

Residents can register to vote at Atomic Books, HONtown, Sugar, Breathe Books, Kiss N' Make-up, Avenue Antiques and Fleckenstein Gallery.

Ray said he feels the registration drive is important because of the high number of people in the neighborhood who don't vote.  While campaigning for Otis Rolley III who is a mayoral candidate in this fall's election, Ray said he was struck by the amount of people in the neighborhood who weren’t registered to vote, said they had never voted -- and were proud of that fact.

“I believe civic duty is civic duty, not civic choice,” Ray said.

The voter registration push will continue thoughout the summer and culminates with the Hampden Community Council’s Candidate Night scheduled for Aug. 22.