Their proposed solution? Get the MSU administration to recognize Election Day as a university holiday, meaning no classes would be held that day.

Yevseyev and Russel, co-founders of the MSU chapter of Un-Pac, said they met with a few university trustees in the spring to propose their election day holiday initiative. What they were told then, said Yevseyev, is that they lacked evidence showing sufficient student support for their proposal.

Since then, Yevseyev and Russel, alongside a handful of student volunteers, have begun to canvass academic buildings and residence halls across campus, collecting signatures to demonstrate student interest in their cause. Currently, the group has collected roughly 1,100 student signatures.  

Russel said the group aims to amass 3,000 signatures by the end of the academic year. That does mean, however, that the group’s ultimate goal of having classes canceled on election day would not be relevant until 2026, when the next general election will be held.

"Even if we don’t have our demands (met)," Yevseyev said. "Elections are still going to happen after this election, and by getting our name out there, we’re putting the idea into the student body’s mind."

This is not the first time that students at MSU have attempted to lobby university administration over this issue. Most recently, in 2021, the Associated Students Of Michigan State University (ASMSU) recommended that the administration hold no classes on election day as part of a larger restructuring of the academic calendar. That proposal was ultimately rejected over concerns that the added day off would unbalance the calendar.

Georgia Frost, the president of ASMSU’s general assembly in 2021, said one large obstacle that prevented the university from accepting the proposal was that election day lacks recognition as a federal holiday. Frost said that it’s more difficult for the university to create rules and holidays that don’t fall in line within federal designation.

"(MSU) has much more leverage to have special programming and special accommodations for other federally recognized dates," Frost said. "The fact that election day doesn’t have that means that they don’t have that to use as a launching point."

However, Frost expressed skepticism over the university’s reasoning for blocking the proposal. For other dates such as fall break, she said, the university has had no problem moving around the calendar to make it work.

Ultimately, Frost chalked up ASMSU’s inability to get the election day proposal approved to a lack of "appetite" from the university. If the combined willpower of students, faculty and administration existed, she said, the proposal may have passed.

In 2019, just a few years before Frost’s ASMSU attempts, students at Wayne State University pressured their administration with a similar goal. The only difference? They succeeded.

Stuart Baum, president of Wayne State’s student senate in 2019, said their proposal to get classes canceled on election day was only one element of a larger voter enfranchisement package. Baum said their initial goal was to open an on-campus voting location and only later included the holiday initiative after hearing concerns from the student body.

In the years since then, the university has seen an impressively high amount of political engagement from its student body. In the 2020 election, according to Wayne State, more than 90% of students there registered to vote and 73.5% ultimately came out to vote.

What led to the proposal’s success, Baum said, was that the students, university and the city of Detroit all had aligning interests that generated the necessary political willpower. The students were eager to make voting easier for themselves, the university wanted to affirm its commitment to civil rights and the city was interested in opening another polling location. Those overlapping interests made for a collaborative process rather than one mired in administrative infighting.

For the student organizers of Un-PAC, who are operating outside the confines of student government and thus don’t have a direct line to the administration, that amount of willpower might appear harder to generate. However, Baum said, the key to success still lies in building a coalition with those who have similar interests. 

"Gathering signatures and gathering interests among the student body is key," Baum said. "But then also building power with faculty, who may be passionate about this, and with the unions, who many of their members are already volunteering around election season and may be interested in collaborating too."