Gov. Jesse Ventura and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak urged students to vote Tuesday at a voting-power rally on the Northrop Plaza.
Rybak said students should vote to make legislators take a student voting bloc seriously.
“There is not a great hue and cry at the state Capitol to help the University of Minnesota,” he said.
Ventura said students should join him in refusing to vote for Republicans or Democrats.
“We here in America, we get one more choice than Iraq,” he said.
The media makes it difficult for college students to support third parties by not giving those candidates the same coverage, Ventura said.
“You saw Monday the seated governor’s party not allowed to debate,” he said of the U.S. Senate debate between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Walter Mondale.
Ventura confronted sign-waving Mondale supporters as he left the event.
“Why wouldn’t you let us debate?” he said. “Mondale made the call.”
Interim University President Robert Bruininks and the Green Party’s Senate candidate, Ray Tricomo, also attended the event.
Tricomo said he and Jim Moore, the Independence Party’s Senate candidate, are still considering legal action against organizers of Monday’s debate for allowing only Coleman and Mondale to participate.
Speaking on CNN on Tuesday afternoon, Ventura said he was outraged that media outlets, Republicans and Democrats would not let other major-party candidates join Monday’s debate.
“In my opinion, every candidate whose party has received major-party status should be allowed to debate regardless of what these phony polls show,” he said.
