Check back here throughout the day for live, updated election news.
Election Day begins
7:00 a.m.
Jeremy Gottschalk
It’s Election Day, and voters, including many UCF students voting for their first time, head to the polls to ensure their voices are heard.
Turning Point USA representative Luis Quintanila is a first-time voter. On Monday, while set up outside of the John C. Hitt Library, he said, “TPUSA tables about fifteen to twenty hours a week normally. During the election week, we try and focalize just on the elections.”
Quintanila, sophomore political science major, said that voting is important because it gives you the ability to make changes.
“Honestly, I don’t think there is many things, at my young age, that I can do,” Quintanila said. “I don’t have a family. I don’t have children. So, this is one way that I can dictate and try to change the world little by little.”
When asked about what he would say to voters, Quintanilla said, “Especially our generation, get off your butts.” He explained that some eligible citizens are disgruntled with the state of the country but do nothing, and encouraged young voters to change their mindset, get off the couch and go to the polls.
Felippe Fischer works for Dr. Jane Aman for the FL House District 37 campaign and discussed the importance of voting. Fischer has been voting since 2016 and “hasn’t missed an election since”.
“Call me a little cliché, but I think it’s important [to vote] because it is one of the many ways you can make your voice heard in not only your community but your government. Politics, government, happens with or without your input,” senior legal studies major Fisher said.
Daugherty, a member of the Students for a Democratic Society and first-time Florida voter, said that a lot of people have lost faith in the process, are discouraged, see elections as rigged and don’t believe they have a voice due to the idea that the whole nation has been bought out and owned by billionaires.
“That’s what [billionaires] want us to believe,” junior biomedical sciences major Daugherty said. “They are trying so hard to push that idea on to make us docile, and to just turn over, and not vote. We still have power as people, we give these people power. They mean nothing without us.”
UCF Office of Military and Veteran Student Success Director and 23-year Army veteran Mike Kepner will be voting on Election Day. Kepner explained that the way to stay the greatest country in the world requires citizens to take part in that experiment.
“As a veteran, it is incredibly important to exercise that right to vote,” Kepner said. “It is one of those things as veterans, we swear an oath to the Constitution.”
Kepner’s first trip to the polls was the midterms in 1990. Now, Kepner will be voting on Nov. 3 with his son, first-time voter and UCF freshman music major Braden Kepner.
“It has been so neat as a parent to watch him go through his own research, his own critical thinking about the issues and what he was looking at for his votes,” Kepner said. “It’s been very eye-opening to watch the next generation of voters and what’s important to them.”