Announced Republican presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul speaks at the Faith & Freedom Coalition's "Road to Majority" conference June 18, 2015 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)

With presidential elections a little over a year away, a group of Ball State students are planning to grow support for republican candidate Rand Paul throughout the coming year.

Senior telecommunications major Dakota Myrick and senior business major Jacob Huntzinger are in the early stages of organizing Students for Rand at Ball State, which will join other chapters of college students across the country.

“Currently, we are still in the process of getting the ground game going after becoming an official chapter,” Myrick said. “Indiana is a late primary, so we are currently still in the strategizing process as an executive board working with the national campaign.”

Myrick is helping start the Students for Rand chapter on Ball State’s campus to show young people that there are “more than two ways of thinking.” He said Paul and the “liberty movement in general” stand for constitutionally limited government, social tolerance, lower taxes and less regulation.

“We support Rand Paul because of his stances on limited government, lower taxes, social tolerance, and a non-interventionist foreign policy,” Myrick said. “We support his efforts to reign in and end illegal surveillance of innocent American’s by the NSA, and also his efforts to reform the criminal justice system by ending the War on Drugs.”

Ball State’s Students for Rand chapter is not yet an official campus organization, but Myrick and Huntzinger are aiming to gather 1,000 Ball State students to vote for Paul in the Indiana primary election, which is May 3, 2016.

“We have visited several campus organizations to get SFR’s name out there, and we have received a lot of interest in students wanting to get involved and volunteer,” Huntzinger said. “We are expecting to have our first official meeting in the next few weeks.”