Schools have key role to play in youth voting
Credit: nshepard / flickr
Credit: nshepard / flickr
In the shadows of the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the fearfully low turnout of youth voters in terminal Nov'south elections should raise an alarm nigh the future of our democracy.
Co-ordinate to a January study from the California Civic Engagement Project at UC Davis, simply 8.2 percent of eligible eighteen- to 24-year-olds voted statewide. In raw numbers, that translates to a mere 285,000 out of 3.5 one thousand thousand adults in that age group.
How to engage young people is role of a larger claiming about voter participation in general, which has been failing for decades. High schools accept a particularly important role to play in addressing the event.
"That is the place where we can be near constructive," Mindy Romero, managing director of the UC Davis project, told Capitol Radio terminal autumn. "If you get to youth before they are 18, if you teach them not only the civics procedure, but besides the how and the why and the what about how to actually vote, yous are much more likely to go them to turn out when they are eighteen."
Once they do that, she said, voting is "addiction forming." "If yous don't go them when they are young, then only some of them come into the electorate when they are older."
California is 1 of 10 states that require schools to serve as voter registration agencies or facilitate registration drives on their campuses. It is also one of even fewer states that allow pre-registration of 17-year-onetime voters.
Land law designates the last two weeks of Apr and September "loftier school voter weeks." That'southward when school administrators must allow voter registrars on campus to sign up potential voters.
In an effort to increase the effectiveness of on-campus registration efforts, last twelvemonth Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 1817, authored by Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, D-Los Angeles. In the hopes that immature people will be more than effective than adults in reaching their peers, the law allows schoolhouse officials to designate students as "voter outreach coordinators" on their campuses and to register or pre-register their classmates.
In addition, Assembly Bill 700, passed past the Legislature in 2013, requires the Instructional Quality Commission to ensure that voter instruction information is included in the high school American Government and Civics curriculum.
If there is one bright spot, information technology is that 18-year-olds who do annals turn out at slightly college numbers than 20- to 25-year-olds. This reflects a more often than not higher turnout of commencement-fourth dimension voters. It suggests that if immature people can exist enticed to annals, they volition turn out in higher numbers.
The challenge thereafter is to keep them engaged. Another is making sure their votes are counted. Co-ordinate to Romero, 1 in 5 mail-in ballots submitted past eighteen- to 24-year-olds is rejected because it arrives late – a higher percentage than any other historic period group.
Senate Bill 29, which Gov. Chocolate-brown likewise signed concluding year, will allow an absentee ballot to be counted if it arrives upwardly to three days after ballot mean solar day. That should help somewhat to address the late-ballot effect. Just that is non the point; tackling low levels of youth date in the electoral process is. That will crave upgrading civics teaching on high school campuses. Civics has suffered as a result of the nation's preoccupation with holding students and schools "accountable" for how they perform on tests of math and English arts.
That is why the Power of Democracy project, whose goal is to promote "borough learning" in K-12 schools around the state, holds so much promise. Vi counties – the most recent being Alameda County only last Fri – are forming "Civic Learning Partnerships" to convince schoolhouse boards to implement civic engagement strategies that have been shown to be especially constructive.
Civics education efforts like these will merely be effective if they honestly address the multiple reasons immature people – and voters of all ages – are alienated from the electoral process in e'er larger numbers.
"If Selma taught us anything, it's that our work is never done," President Barack Obama said in Selma last week in one of his most eloquent speeches. "The American experiment in self-government gives piece of work and purpose to each generation."
For the most part, young people have yet to embrace that purpose. Typically the teeth-gnashing about how few of them vote occurs effectually the time of every election. But by then it is also tardily to do annihilation about information technology. Identifying ways to engage potential youth voters – and how schools tin be more effective in doing so – must be a multi-year activity that should business organisation every abet of commonwealth, regardless of party affiliation.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that AB 1817, authored by Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, was authored by Sen. Alex Padilla. Padilla authored SB 35, so called "motor voter" legislation involving the Department of Motor Vehicles.
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Source: https://edsource.org/2015/schools-have-key-role-to-play-in-youth-voting/76162
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