Miss Holmen aims to rock youth into voting

Hannah Rock, the reigning Miss Holmen, is pushing her voting promotion platform, making appearances to urge young people to get involved in politics. Rock reviewed her activities for members of the Holmen Area Civic and Commerce Association at its meeting Feb. 12.

Her platform, educating youths on the importance of voting, is just one of her political activities.

Rock is a political science/pre-law student at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Although the junior said she wasn’t sure just what field of law she wants to go into yet, Rock did talk about one of her dreams.

“I want to be a judge,” she said. “That’s one of my long-term goals.”

For now, Rock is working on her education platform. This past presidential election, she visited Holmen High School and registered about a quarter of the seniors to vote. She created what she labeled unbiased fliers about what was at stake in the election and worked as a poll worker at Holmen Village Hall.

“I tried to make voters feel okay about the process so they’d feel comfortable about voting in the future,” Rock said.

As a co-chair of the UW-L campus group supporting GOP presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain, she conducted telephone surveys for the candidate and helped organize the McCain rally in La Crosse.

Rock said she is now an ambassador for Vote Smart, a national organization based in Montana that produces heavily researched and unbiased information about candidates and issues. “It’s important to have unbiased information for making decisions,” she said.