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new tonight the University of Southern Indiana is playing an active role in fostering Civic engagement ahead of the 2024 presidential election 44 news reporter Jordan Wayland is live there tonight the look at the presidential debate watch party Jordan USI is ramping up its efforts to engage students and the community ahead of the 2024 presidential election with a series of events held here on campus like tonight's watch party joining me today I'm I am here with USI political science Professor Dr Matt Hanka how are you tonight Hi how are you thank you I great now kind of talk to me why do you think it's important for the University of Southern Indiana to host events like this for civic engagement I mean it's important to educate students to live in a Democratic Society and so our department it's a part of our mission it's a part of what we do and so having an event like this we had a great turnout tonight um it's a way of just en enhancing Civic engagement you know Indiana has some of the lowest uh voter turnouts in the country and vanderberg county is among one of the lowest in terms of voter turnouts so this is critical to have events like this to get people engaged in the political process very important to educate those around us now um what do you hope students and the community will take away from the watch party that you guys had here tonight well a lot of what we did before the watch party was we we sort of gave some had a nice discussion about Civility and Pro proper discourse and critical thinking and sort of be thinking about the issues and how they're presented without looking at simply the opponent and trying to attack them they trying to think about important things behind understanding an argument and understanding counterarguments and and just understanding proper political discourse so we hope students tonight came away learning a little bit about that and then what we told them they could see and of course they probably had a lot of instances where they say oh well that's a false attack or that's a circular reasoning or that's an ad homonym attack or some some things like that so this is just one of many things that we're going to try to do this semester to engage people so we we're going to have a Governor's watch debate we're going to have a uh reading of the Constitution we're going to have a voter registration drive and and even some students a few minutes ago were saying well let's do this for the vice presidential debate on October 1st so um this is getting students really exciting and to provide these opportunities for students that come together maybe some of them wouldn't have thought about the debate had we not hosted this um this this and we got some grant funding from this group called the community engaged Alliance and that was important uh strengthening uh involvement uh among students in terms of the electoral process especially in an important presidential year and I think uh tonight was a very important kind of Engagement for the community and the students here thank you so much for joining us thank you for coming tonight appreciate it thank you everybody yes now in addition to the watch party the department will will also be holding a weeklong voter registration drive from the 16th to the 20th reporting in Evansville Jordan whan 44 news thank you Jordan