Paid canvassers have been approaching students on campus to register to vote, violating Lafayette’s soliciting guidelines and prompting college officials to issue a no-trespass order.

Such activity has sparked concerns of a repeat of an incident from the 2022 United States election cycle, where “a number of students who had registered with outside voter registration organizations were not registered correctly and were unable to cast their ballots on Election Day,” according to Chelsea Morrese, the director of the Landis Center for Community Engagement.

The canvassers are representatives of Forward Majority PAC, a Democrat-affiliated organization that aims to register students to vote in swing states.

Jonas Guerriere ‘26 was a student spoken to by the group.

“I was walking with my roommates going towards Farinon, past Colton [Chapel], and they came from the Quad, sort of out of the bushes,” he said.

Guerriere said he was “a bit taken aback” by the sudden appearance of the group.

“That’s an odd place to do this and an odd way of doing it,” he said.

“I’m not really confrontational,” said Clare Socolow ‘27, who also encountered the canvassers. “Anytime I see people who might have a petition, I walk the other way, or put on my headphones and do a death stare at the ground and just keep going straight.”

Kate SantaMaria ‘27 was spoken to by the group with her friends at picnic tables near the Quad.

“I was trying to make them go away, just so I could focus, but then they ended up sitting down at the table for a long time,” she said.

Originally, the staffers stationed around the Quad sported pink vests with the phrase “keep abortion legal” across the back. After Lafayette’s Department of Public Safety issued the group a no-trespass order, they continued to send canvassers without their identifying vests to off-campus locations such as Cinco and the McCartney residence hall complex.

Forward Majority PAC did not respond to several requests for comment. Several of the affiliated canvassers declined to comment.

SantaMaria said that the group did mention they were from Forward Majority PAC, but that “they didn’t know anything about it.”

“They had said that they found it on Indeed, which is where you can find jobs, and that they were just getting paid to do it,” SantaMaria continued.

Emma Dwaileebe ‘27 was approached by Forward Majority PAC staffers at Lavender Lane’s Queer Expo to be a student connection on campus that would help the group avoid issues with the college administration.

“They just said that they want a contact on the campus to be involved with so that the administrators don’t give them any problems about being on campus,” she said.

According to Appendix VII in the Lafayette College Student Handbook, any group must receive approval from the college to solicit on campus. Sarah Moschenross, the vice president for student life, wrote in an email that although her office was aware of Forward Majority PAC’s presence through the office’s reporting system, such solicitation requests are handled by the Landis Center.

Morrese could not recall the Landis Center receiving a solicitation request specifically from Forward Majority PAC.

Jeff Troxell, the director of Public Safety, said that he first received a report of Forward Majority PAC’s actions on Aug. 24.

“I think it was from an employee, a report of an unregistered group in front of Farinon,” he said. “We sent officers, we responded, we identified several individuals and we issued a no-trespass order.”

Dimitri Chernozhukov ‘25, a student director for Lafayette Votes, expressed concern about the motivations of paid canvassers being used to register students.

“Canvassers are paid by the number of people they register or get the forms,” Chernozhukov said. “Our goal is not that. Our goal is to register as many Lafayette students as we can and then also provide opportunities for voter education.”

Morrese said that any student who registered through Forward Majority PAC should double-check their registration.

“Lafayette Votes will never walk around campus with clipboards asking students to register to vote and we encourage any student who has registered this way to confirm their voter registration status at least two weeks before Election Day,” Morrese warned.

For Lafayette students, information on registering to vote can be found on the Lafayette Votes website.

This story was originally published on The Lafayette on September 6, 2024.