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Young People Want To Vote. So How Do We Get Them To The Polls?

Civic Nation

The United States has one of the lowest rates of youth voter turnout in the world. The gap between 18 to 29-year-olds and those over 60, a common measuring stick, is more than twice as large in the US than it is in comparable democracies, like Canada and Germany.

Early evidence from 2020 suggests that this is not going to change this year. Youth turnout in the first states to hold primaries and caucuses has ranged from 10 percent in Alabama to 24 percent in Iowa. Fewer young people are voting in 2020, while older citizens are voting at higher rates. 

Continuing a Long-Running Pattern

Why don’t more young people vote? And what might solve this problem? In our new book, Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action, we seek to answer those questions.

The fact that few young people vote is nothing new. Historically, about 55 percent of Americans have voted in presidential elections. Youth voting levels have been much lower than that for decades. In US presidential elections, about 70 percent of voters 60 and up have turned out—which is nearly three times the rate of Americans between 18 and 29.

Getting Interested

Many people argue that younger Americans fail to vote because they are apathetic about politicsYou might have heard that millennials or Generation Z are too cynical, too disinterested, and too self-absorbed to cast a ballot.

But this claim simply isn’t true. In the 2016 general election, for example, a full three out of four of Americans between the age of 18 and 29 said they were interested in politics.

Though many young people intend to vote, they are much more likely to be derailed by obstacles that get in their way. For instance, young people often are confused by complex and unclear voter registration rules. Moreover, youth are especially unlikely to know where they should vote and to be negatively affected when polling places get moved.

In interviews with dozens of young people, we found that many of them lacked confidence in themselves and their ability to navigate the voting process for the first time. Many told us that in their busy, hectic, and ever-changing schedules, voting often simply falls by the wayside.

Simply put, many young people want to participate, care about what happens in the political arena, and plan to participate. But they find doing so too difficult to actually follow through on their good intentions.

Closing the Gap

What can be done to increase youth turnout? Electoral reforms that reduce the complexity of the voting process help encourage young people to follow through and vote.

Our research shows that reforms like same day registration—which allows people to register when they come to cast a ballot even if they have missed the voter registration deadline—and pre-registration for 16 and 17-year-olds, which allows young people to enroll before they have left the home for college or work opportunities—substantially increase youth turnout. 

We show that when these reforms are implemented it helps close the gap between older and younger voters by a third. Our findings are consistent with early work that shows that automatic voter registration substantially increases the number of young people voting for the first time.

This suggests that reforms that work to make voting easier and expand the electorate have great potential to meaningfully increase the turnout for young voters. 

Studying Civics

Civics, taught in many but not all public schools, also plays a vital role.

Proponents for high-quality civicsfrom the Founding Fathers down to public officials todayhave long advocated for an approach that gets young people more politically engaged. 

Instead, many schools favor what we call “bubble sheet civics.” They focus on rote memorization of facts and figures about politics, government and history – the types of things that can be measured on multiple-choice exams.

We find that this approach simply doesn’t lead to a high level of civic engagement, such as voting in elections. Surveys show that taking a civics course in high school does nothing to increase the chances a young person will cast their ballot. And there’s no difference in youth voter turnout rates between states like Florida and Arizona that mandate civics instruction and those that don’t, such as Oregon and Washington.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

We’ve observed that some schools do go beyond bubble sheet civics. They get teens and tweens to discuss contemporary political issues, encourage students to become involved in civic and political actionsuch as by having them help eligible citizens to register and to voteand help their classmates register or preregister. They follow the principles advocated by the All In Challenge. Going this route can make a big difference.

Low Youth Turnout is not Inevitable, But There’s Work to be Done

To make young voters, we need to do more than we’re already doing. Youth voter turnout is at crisis levels in the United States. 

Much is at stake. Young people face many vitally important issues—from climate change to income inequality to gun violence—that will require them to be actively involved in politics. Whether or not they are equipped to do so, however, depends vitally on whether policymakers make voting easier and improve the quality of civics education in the United States.

More than 620 colleges and universities currently participate in the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. Learn more about the Challenge and donate to advance our work here.