Youth Vote 2024: Voter Registration

Source: The League of Women Voters

By Sam Piha

Did you know that in many states young people can pre-register to vote at the age of 16-17? Student organizers and adult volunteers work collaboratively with schools, organizations and events to coordinate voter registration drives that target high school and college students. To learn more about organizing voter registration drive, click here. You can also share a video by young people on voter registration drives by clicking on the image below. 

Source: Our Time is Now: CA Pre-Registration PSA  

Bring Voter Registration to Your High School

“High schools are the most efficient and equitable system we have for getting young people registered, particularly the 40% who do not attend college.” [i]

Source: Ed Week

Paper and online registration drives can occur during classes, lunch periods, school assemblies, school orientation days, school club days, marches, etc. After students register, they are challenged to recruit other youth to register and/or to organize new registration drives and are encouraged to vote in every election. To learn more and access a guide for organizing a registration drive, click here.”

“We registered 103 students in 2.5 hours at one high school with the help of a student League member who attends the school and a social studies teacher and his students.” [ii] - member of the League of Women Voters of Henderson County (NC) 

“The Civics Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that empowers high school students to hold peer-to-peer voter registration events in their high schools. When students invite their peers into the democratic process, they build civic engagement, develop leadership skills and strengthen our democracy. We are committed to nonpartisanship and an inclusive spirit of voter registration. We also prioritize collaboration with school faculty and administration as well as local election officials.” 

Here are the process students will use to organize a voter registration event in your school:

1. Attend a 45-minute online workshop held by The Civics Center which outlines the importance of youth voter registration, the process of planning an event in your school, and how to register to vote and help others to register in your state. Find a workshop for your state on our website.

2. Gather volunteers from a club, honors society, class, or group of friends. 

“I organized a registration drive at my school all by myself. It wasn’t the best time of the year due to AP testing, but I was able to register 99 of my classmates. I also volunteered at other schools’ registration drives. I think we need to get a lot of young adults voting because then if politicians want to be re-elected, they will have to advocate for our views.” [iii] – Michael, high school student  

3. Coordinate with the school administration to pick one or more dates, times, and locations to hold a voter registration event. Voter registration is usually conducted either with tables and clipboards during a lunch period, or through student-led presentations in a homeroom, advisory, or class period.

4. Register your school on The Civics Center’s website listing an estimated date for the planned event and the name and email of a faculty sponsor.

5. Receive a toolkit, Democracy in a Box, free from The Civics Center before the event. Democracy in a Box is a starter kit that includes pens, clipboards, stickers, posters, candy, and more supplies to help make your event as easy as possible and fun for participants. We ship Democracy in a Box to the designated faculty sponsor to promote effective collaboration within the school. 

6. Acquire voter registration forms. We go over this process in the webinar training; in many states, this is as simple as printing a PDF. In some states, it’s simpler to use online voter registration.

7. Hold the voter registration event on the selected date(s) using the materials in Democracy in a Box, and report back the number of registrations to The Civics Center via email. 

8. Return the completed voter registration forms to your local elections official within 2-3 days of the event.” [iv]

“We plan to host registration events, and possibly even parties; on election day, we plan to go with teens who are voting for the first time and to make a big deal of it (e.g., ‘It’s my first-time voting’ hats or sashes).” – Rebecca Fabiano, Executive Director, FAB Youth Philly

NOTE: After registration, a Get Out the Vote campaign can begin. Students are reminded about upcoming candidate forums and elections. Youth are also encouraged to create social events such as Flash Mob Voting (meeting at one location and marching to a post office with mail-in ballots) and election night watch parties.

END NOTES
[i] The Civics Center, Our Purpose
[ii] League of Women Voters, The League Empowers Teens Through Youth Voter Registration Programs
[iii] Youth Voter Movement, About the Movement
[iv] The Civics Center, Bringing Voter Registration to Your High School

Lights on Afterschool Planning Tool

Millions of Youth Are Newly Eligible Voters in 2022

Source: Photo by Mikhail Nilov: https://www.pexels.com

By Sam Piha

The 2022 election offers a number of opportunities to engage older youth. We can frame these efforts as “meaningful participation”, “civic engagement”, “youth leadership” or “community service”. There are a number of organizations and initiatives that have designed curriculums, program tools and other materials to assist afterschool providers in their efforts to engage youth in the 2022 election. Consider working with youth to organize a voter registration event in your school. At the end of the blog, we list some resources on how youth can get involved.

Did you know that:

-“Young people who have turned 18 since the 2020 election are a sizable group that is diversifying the electorate and can have a decisive impact on the midterms. There are an estimated 8.3 million newly eligible young voters for the 2022 midterm elections—meaning, youth who have turned 18 since the previous general election in November 2020. These 18- and 19-year-olds comprise 16% of the 18-29 age group for the 2022 election.” - Peter de Guzman, Researcher

-Young people can pre-register to vote at the age of 16. There are a number of ways that youth can be involved in the 2022 election, even if they are not old enough to vote. These include sponsoring a voter registration event, supporting family and friend’s participation, uplifting stories and issues they care about, supporting a candidate’s campaign through volunteering or being part of the election process.

-“There are distorted “assumptions about young people and how they participate in political processes that are common and are often triggered by lack of understanding and/or by prejudice. These persistent assumptions inaccurately characterize the everyday experiences of most youth – who do not constitute a homogenous group – and can lead to discrimination of young people, negatively affecting their capacity to participate in political processes… Assumptions about young people that distort the actual picture include the following: 

• they are apathetic about and disengaged from politics – so, for example, they don’t bother voting
• they lack maturity, experience, and knowledge, implying they are not capable or intelligent enough to make informed decisions (such as when voting) and are easily manipulated
• they are “anti-state,” with a propensity for violence and extremism.” – The ACE Project

ELECTION VIDEO BY RAPPER, YELLOPAIN

We learned about how teachers and youth workers can use a video by rapper, Yellopain, entitled, "My Vote Don't Count," which can be viewed by clicking on the image below. 

Source: Yellopain, Youtube.com

RESOURCES

Below are a number of other resources that you can check out:

• Growing Voters: 18 Ways Youth Under 18 Can Contribute to Elections 
• Afterschool Alliance Election Toolkit
• Rock the Vote Democracy Class
• The Civics Center- Bringing Voter Registration to Your School

You can also learn more by exploring these websites:

• Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE)
• Afterschool Alliance
• Rock the Vote
• The Civics Center

EDUCATION CULTURE WARS AND AFTERSCHOOL

In recent months schools and educators have been attacked under the guise of critical race theory, parent rights and the call to ban certain books. We published three LIAS blogs and a briefing paper (14 pages) on this topic of the education culture wars. We also sponsored a webinar entitled, Education Culture Wars and Maintaining Bipartisan Support for Afterschool. We posted a recording of this webinar on our How Kids Learn Youtube channel, which quickly received over 700 views. 

New stories of the education culture wars continue to pepper the national news and we expect this to increase over the course of the upcoming election season. 

Below we list some new articles:

• 3 Ways to Avoid Hurdles for Social-Emotional Learning 
• A School Librarian Pushes Back on Censorship and Gets Death Threats and Online Harassment 
• As Rhetoric Heats Up, Many Parents Fear Politicians Are Using Children As ‘Political Pawns’ 
• Banned-Book Author: If a Book Isn’t in the School Library, ‘It Might as Well Not Exist’ 
• Most parents want classrooms to be places of learning, not political battlegrounds 
• ED Week Spotlight on Critical Race Theory

Engaging Youth in the 2020 Election

By Sam Piha

(This blog was authored prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. At this point the decision to re-open schools in the Fall, and afterschool programs, is not yet clear. Thus, at the end of the blog, we list some suggestions on how youth can be involved in the Fall election digitally.)

The 2020 election offers a number of opportunities to engage older youth and with recent Black Lives Matters escalating efforts, there is no better time for youth to be involved in making a change through the ballot box. We can frame these efforts as “meaningful participation”, “civic engagement”, “youth leadership” or “community service”. There are a number of organizations and initiatives that have designed curriculums, program tools and other materials to assist afterschool providers in their efforts to engage youth in the 2020 election.

Source: Getty Images

Did you know that young people can pre-register to vote at the age of 16-17? I didn’t, until I learned this from some of these materials below. There are a number of ways that youth can be involved in the 2020 election, even if they are not old enough to vote. These include sponsoring a voter registration event, supporting family and friend’s participation, uplifting stories and issues they care about, supporting a candidate’s campaign through volunteering or being part of the election process.

Donny Faaliliu,
After-School All-Stars, Los Angeles

We asked Donny Faaliliu, Director of Leadership and Community Outreach with After-School All-Stars, Los Angeles, how they are planning to engage youth in the 2020 elections. He responded, "After-School All-Stars, Los Angeles plans to engage our high school students through our youth leadership programs. The expectations would be for each school to host informative meetings on campus to educate students to use their voice through the voting process. The Democracy Class curriculum will help us to accomplish this goal. This curriculum is user friendly and the activity plans are easy to follow. It is a great resource for students because it provides valuable information on voter education, registration and the importance of voter turn-out. The webinar trainings were also very helpful and informative on how to best maximize this wonderful resource."

We also learned about how teachers and youth workers can use a video by rapper, Yellopain, entitled, "My Vote Don't Count," which can be viewed by clicking on the image below. 

Source: Yellopain, "My Vote Don't Count"

Below are a number of resources that you can check out:

• Growing Voters: 18 Ways Youth Under 18 Can Contribute to Elections
• Afterschool Alliance Election Toolkit
• Rock the Vote Democracy Class
• The Civics Center- Bringing Voter Registration to your School
• Ed Week: Michelle Obama Wants to Train Teachers to Help Students Vote
• New York Times- Election 2020: 11 Ways to Engage Students From Now Until November

You can also learn more by exploring these websites:

• Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE)
• Afterschool Alliance
• Rock the Vote
• The Civics Center

Digital tools for youth who want to engage in the 2020 election:

• Youth Service America Youth Service Briefing- Protect the 2020 Election from the Coronavirus