From helping organize a town hall meeting for Vice President Kamala Harris to programming a Spanish-language voter identification chatbot to recruiting dozens of new poll workers on campus, University of Maryland students found new ways to get politically involved this summer, just months before a crucial presidential election.

The 18 students in the first class of the Laufer Democracy Internship Program, sponsored by Marsha Zlatin Laufer (class of 1964) and Henry Laufer, worked for nonprofits such as Pizza to the Polls, Vote Early Day and the Campus Vote Project. On Wednesday, they shared their experiences with community partners, faculty and staff, and other interns at the Adele H. Stamp Student Union.

The complicated web of U.S. election laws can be intimidating for those looking to vote for the first time. “It is therefore critical that we engage some of our university’s most talented students and work with the nation’s leading coalition to reach college campuses and welcome new voters,” said Sam Novey, chief strategist for the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and leads the internship program developed in partnership with the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition and the Maryland Fellows Program.

The program is part of the nonpartisan, interdisciplinary Maryland Democracy Initiative (MDI), funded by a Grand Challenges Impact Award and led by principal investigator Lena Morreale Scott, director of the Civic Education and Engagement Initiative in the College of Education. MDI brings together expertise from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, the College of Education, the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, and the School of Public Policy to promote civic participation and counter threats to democracy.

During a poster session, Marsha Laufer asked one student after another, “What was the spark that sparked your interest in politics?” The answers were inspiring, she said, especially “at an age when many of their contemporaries have historically been disinterested. … Our democracy is in very good hands.”

Laiba Nisar (senior year ’26), a government and political science student, said it was “surreal” to be in the same room with Harris this summer when Nisar was in Philadelphia helping organize a town hall meeting on the presidential election.

“I grew up in a very conservative area on the East Coast where I didn’t see a lot of people who looked like me,” Nisar said. “Now the candidate running is an Asian American, and as an Asian American woman myself, I think that representation will make a huge difference.”

Wren Massey (senior ’27), a women’s, gender and sexuality studies and Spanish major, opened her eyes to the disenfranchisement of not only Indigenous peoples, but also other marginalized communities, including people with disabilities, through her internship at the Native American Rights Fund.

“I really want to be a civil rights lawyer and originally I was going to focus on search and seizure and privacy rights,” Massey said. “But now I’m really into election law because that’s a crazy field,” with different laws in every state.

One of the program’s goals is to link the internships to MDI studies, Novey said, such as a potential collaboration between researchers studying the number of people without voter ID and a student who now runs a voter ID hotline as part of his internship. “The students have planted seeds that we’d like to expand on.”

Several students will continue their internships throughout the school year, such as political science major Javier Holdemar Fuentes (senior ’27), who will work as an election research assistant for the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement in the fall, and Ryan Carr (senior ’25), who will continue to teach students about voter registration and poll worker recruitment through TerpsVote in the lead-up to the election. “This is definitely the year to get involved,” Carr said. “Political changes have made people more motivated to vote.”

The program is a shining example of how Terps are addressing the most pressing challenges facing society today, said Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice.

“I am more confident than ever that our students will become groundbreaking leaders and advocates for the future of our country,” she said.

This story first appeared in Maryland Today.

Top photo: Sophia Winner (Class of ’25), who studies both government and politics and economics, presents her summer internship with the Scholars Strategy Network, made possible by the Laufer Democracy Internship Program. Photo by Riley N. Sims Ph.D. (Class of ’23)