Martha Guarnieri caught the bug for social and political activism after interning last summer for an international labor rights organization in Washington, D.C. She organized a successful street demonstration outside the offices of a public relations agency representing a major tire manufacturer accused of exploiting rubber workers in Liberia.

Guarnieri, a Rutgers College junior majoring in political science and women’s and gender studies, led the voter registration and Get out the Vote (GOTV) effort on Rutgers’ three campuses. She started as an intern at the Eagleton Institute of Politics and ended up heading the RU Voting Coalition, a network of student groups of all political and cultural stripes with the nonpartisan aim of getting college students more politically involved.

This semester, the coalition registered more than 6,000 students – 4,000 on the New Brunswick Campus, and 2,000 in Newark and Camden, Guarnieri said.

Elizabeth Matto, coordinator of the Youth Political Participation Program (YPPP) at Eagleton, said Guarnieri was an unassuming student with an interest in politics when she started her internship, but quickly became more active and curious.

Hometown: Haddon Heights, N.J.

Postgraduation plans: Union organizing and possibly law school

Motivation: Martha's father is a newspaper copy editor and mother is a nurse practitioner. Both are very socially aware. “My parents are both doing things that they care about. My dad makes me read the newspaper all the time.”

“In the beginning she just played a supporting role, but as time passed, she spearheaded the RU Voting Coalition,” said Matto, noting that Guarnieri identified the inefficiency of having many different student groups getting involved in voter registration.

The YPPP emphasizes the academic background of voting and political participation, and Martha spent many months understanding the scholarship behind youth participation and mobilization drives. She worked on mobilization efforts during the 2006 senatorial election in New Jersey and gained a better understanding of the student landscape.

Going into this election year, Guarnieri understood the many misconceptions that college students have about voting. Many think they can only vote at their home address, and that their financial aid or student status would somehow be at risk if they were registered on campus. Part of the work of the RU Voting Coalition went toward dispelling those myths.

Guarnieri and fellow organizers from the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group (NJPIRG) grabbed voluminous lists of student organizations and began the outreach process. Eventually, cultural groups like Hillel and the NAACP, student organizations like the Rutgers University Student Assembly and the Engineering Government Council, and political groups like RU Democrats and Democracy Matters pooled their resources and began meeting together regularly.

Guarnieri said that she got a valuable lesson in overcoming organizational obstacles in order to achieve goals. “There is a big challenge in doing voter registration at a huge university. We had these huge institutional barriers, such as reaching out to faculty, getting into residence halls, [and] getting access to freshman orientation,” Guarnieri said.

Establishing important links helped. Guarnieri said that relationships with College Avenue Campus Dean Matt Matsuda, history Professor Jennifer Jones, and the president’s office provided access that at some points had been daunting. Many faculty members were more than willing to allow students from the voting coalition into classrooms to hand out registration forms and talk about political participation.

The Office of Information Technology was particularly helpful, Guarnieri said, in getting a “Register to Vote” widget, or button,.placed on my.rutgers.edu, Sakai, and other internal websites that students frequently use – that button helped guide students to an electronic form to register to vote.

“A lot of students ask when we’re doing registration: ‘Can we do it online?’ I think that something like 3,500 students completed that form,” Guarnieri said. Then students simply print out the form and mail it to their county election boards.

In the days before the election, dozens of students showed up to a coalition meeting wanting to get involved in GOTV work – knocking on dorm doors, blanketing campuses with fliers, and getting students to send in absentee ballots early.

“There are going to be tons of lines,” Guarnieri said a few days before the election. “We don’t want anyone to use the excuse that they have class all day, so they couldn’t make it.”