With less than 1 percent of Binghamton University students voting from campus last year, canvassers are trying to use financial incentive to get residents to the polls.

The Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) held its second campus-wide voter registration contest from Oct. 2 to Oct. 10. Residential communities competed to see who could register the most voters — including absentee ballots — with the top two communities splitting a prize of $2,500 for their treasuries.

According to Nicholas Doran, the University’s Andrew Goodman Foundation’s “Vote Everywhere” ambassador and a sophomore majoring in political science, the official results will not be announced until they are certified by the Broome County Board of Elections within the week. However, according to Jonathan Krasno, a political science professor, the leader was College-in-the-Woods.

The competition was spearheaded by Krasno, who got the idea from a student and suggested it to the CCE. He said that the competition was in response to a low student voting turnout and that engaging the campus in annual elections would give students political power. The money was contributed by the Vice President of Student Affairs office, the CCE and Residential Life.

“In Binghamton politics, students aren’t really regarded as anything at all,” Krasno said. “Showing up in elections would be a massive thing. It would make politicians come to campus. It would make the city of Vestal and Binghamton pay much more attention to the needs of campus.”

However, Krasno said that getting students involved was easier said than done.

“The question was, what do you do to get them to participate in the elections if they’re not really that interested?” Krasno said.

According to Krasno, RAs were put in charge of encouraging their communities to vote, but they had mixed responses when asked to participate in the contest.

“I’ve heard that a lot of RAs have said that their plates are full and there’s no way they’re going to add another duty to what they’re doing,” Krasno said. “Other RAs who are more interested in politics jumped at the chance.”

Allison Alden, director of the CCE, said she anticipated that holding another voting competition would lead to results similar to those from the 2012 competition, which defied national norms.

“In 2008 with the Obama candidacy there was a huge number of young people who registered to vote, and voted,” Alden said. “It dipped in 2012. Our campus actually increased by 30 percent, and that was the year that we started the competition.”

Andrew Henry, voting advocacy organization Turbovote’s coordinator for the University and a senior majoring in philosophy, politics and law, said that the competition was geared toward on-campus students. However, he said the CCE is reaching out to the off-campus community as well.

“Off-campus students are notoriously difficult to reach, because they don’t have a collective population center,” Henry said. “We’re getting the word out as best as we can with CCE emails, and things like that, because they’re mostly juniors and seniors we hope that the off-campus community have perhaps already registered to vote.”

Doran has worked with the CCE on political engagement and said he wants to make voting more accessible to students.

“We’re hopefully gonna have debates with local senate races, maybe county legislators,” Doran said. “Then we’re going to have an election day celebration. There’s gonna be food and music. We want it to be fun.”