Somewhere between getting eligible voters to fill out voter-registration forms and actually getting them registered, the system broke down and some Purdue students weren't able to vote in Tuesday's election.

Many Purdue students tried to register through a variety of campus organizations only to find on Tuesday that they had not been registered to vote in the election.

This kind of failure in the system only encourages more voter apathy.

On Monday the voter registration board in Tippecanoe County received nearly 1,000 calls from people who wanted to know if they were registered for the upcoming election.

Some of the confusion came from people like Robyn McGimsey, a senior in the School of Consumer and Family Sciences, who never received her voter registration card. McGimsey wrote a letter to the Exponent, which we printed below.

McGimsey was under the impression that she was registered until she called the office of the Tippecanoe County Voter Registration office and discovered that she wasn't registered.

It wasn't until Hilary Snover, a junior in the School of Agriculture, went to the polls on Tuesday, that she found out she wasn't registered to vote.

It appears that many other Purdue students faced similar problems on Tuesday.

Voter turnout is a serious problem in this country. According to Associated Press reports, an estimated 50.7 percent of Americans old enough to vote cast ballots Tuesday. This number is higher than in 1996 and lower and than it was in 1992. In Tippecanoe County, only 55 percent of the registered voters actually voted.

For these students to show interest in the political process and try to register only to find that they are not able to vote is a travesty.

Either the campus organizations who were registering students didn't send in the forms on time or the Tippecanoe County Voter Registration office failed to process the forms before the deadline. Whoever is responsible for this breakdown in the system, the bottom line is that these students were not able to vote on Tuesday. Campus groups interested in registering students and the Tippecanoe County Voter Registration office need to figure out what went wrong this year and work together to make sure that these problems don't occur in the future.

Editorial Board: Sarah Loehr, Nick Giordano, Adrienne Kleman, Olivia Conroy, Nathan Cross.