Zombie-themed escape room hopes to help state voters

This story originally aired on KX News.

The League of Women Voters of North Dakota (LWVND) is a political grassroots network and membership organization, which believes the freedom to vote is a nonpartisan issue.

For more than a century, the Fargo-based League of Women Voters has worked to empower voters and defend democracy across the state. This year, they intend to do with a bizarre option — an online zombie-themed escape room.

“This is just a fun way to get people involved,” explained LWVND representative Carol Sawicki. “To teach people or get people comfortable with the idea of what you need to vote in North Dakota, and what the process is like. People like puzzles, and doing things in different ways. We’ve got all sorts of different things that the league does, especially vote411.org — which is mentioned the escape room.”

The digital escape room begins by setting the scene: you’ve recently moved to Bismarck, and are dreaming of showing off your ‘I voted’ sticker in the following days, but things go horribly wrong. The program will then begin to ask you questions based on the rules and regulations regarding state elections. Once they record your answers, the next slide will take you to more information relating to each question, and whether you were right or wrong.

This process continues until your character manages to successfully escape the monsters that threaten your quest to vote. As much fun as the digital escape room sounds, Sawicki says it’s all about knowledge — and that as the old saying goes, knowledge is power.

“If you don’t want to vote,” Sawicki noted, “you don’t care. But if you do want to vote, and you don’t know what the regulations are, what you need to bring to the to the polls, and how to find information while you’re there, you’re lost. This is just one more way of getting people to realize it’s not very difficult — you just need a few things like an up to date ID. You need to know where you’re gonna have to go to vote, too — where your polling places are. And if you don’t know how you want to vote, vote 411 is a good way to learn that sort of stuff. Anything that makes more people feel comfortable with the process of voting is important.”

Salwicki continues to state that voting is the only way you can have any control over your state, local and national laws is by voting.

“A lot of people are excited,” she concluded, “or not excited but know about voting for president — but they don’t realize that there’s all sorts of other things on the ballot that are in some ways more important, because they affect the local elections the city elections and so forth, which will affect you much more directly. This will hopefully get them to realize that they can — and should — vote in any election.”

If you want to mark your calendar for some local political need-to-know dates, March 30 will begin the Dem-NPL Vote-by-Mail Presidential Primary, and June 11 is the State Primary and City General Election.

To hop into the escape room or mark more dates, click here.