Voting Matters: Informing Youth Why Voting is Essential to American Democracy

Please note that this is an incomplete list of all the activities occurring across the country regarding youth voting. To add your program, please contact Gary Homana at sndysandman@aol.com

With just about a month to go until Election Day, NACE is temporarily providing a spotlight on what our own members, as well as other organizations, across the country are doing to inform younger Americans about why voting matters, along with how to be an informed voter and how and where to vote. We also provide some basic facts about trends in turnout among young Americans. This information is for the use of organizations and individuals who want to know about activity in the youth voting arena.

ALERT: register to vote for Tuesday, November 5, or check that you are registered http://register.votenet.com/LWV/

Since 1972, the first year when 18-21-year-olds were permitted to vote, voter turnout among youth has declined significantly. The following are some basic facts on youth voting trends, according to the recent report "Youth Voter Turnout has Declined, by Any Measure" (calculated from 1972 to 2000 U.S. Census Current Population Surveys) by Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE).

• While overall voter turnout among Americans has declined about 2 percentage points, and turnout among Americans 25 years and older has declined about 4 percentage points, youth vote 18-to-24-year-olds has declined 13 percentage points.
• Youth vote as a percentage of voters has declined 6 percentage points(from 14 to 8 percent).
• Male voter turnout has declined 15 percentage points (from 55 to 40 percent).
• Female voter turnout has declined 12 percentage points (from 55 to 43 percent).
• Married and single youth voter turnout has declined 7 percentage points and 29 percentage points, respectively.
• Voter turnout among youth with less than a high school education and with a high school diploma has declined 4 percentage points and 14 percentage points, respectively.
• Voter turnout among youth with some college and those youth who are college graduates has declined 20 percentage points and 9 percentage points, respectively.

For more information on voting trends among youth, see the report at http://www.civicyouth.org/research/products/fact_sheets_outside.htm

The American Bar Association's Voting Rights and Responsibilities site http://www.abanet.org/vote/ was developed in connection with its sponsorship of the Freedom's Answer project, http://www.freedomsanswer.net/home.shtml a national initiative to maximize voter turnout in this year's elections. The ABA Vote site includes downloadable materials on voter registration, voter rights and responsibilities, and the history of voting rights that can be used by lawyers, teachers, students, and voters.

Campus Compact's National Student Civic Engagement Campaign: Students Rebuilding Democracy provides many activities that seek to engage more students in civic activities including voting and voter education. At the site you will find information regarding voter registration, education, mobilization, including suggested activities and model practices as well as links to other relevant websites.

By the end of the two-year grant, well over a hundred thousand students will have experienced civic engagement as a fundamental part of their education, and, for many, that experience will shape their lives as citizens. Moreover, the resources and atmosphere on hundreds of university and college campuses will reflect a new emphasis on democratic renewal.

The National Student Engagement Campaign's three overarching objectives include:

• Increase college student involvement in public life and connect these actions with a larger national student movement around civic engagement that reaches an estimated 1 in 10 college students on at least 650 campuses;

• Document and highlight student civic engagement activities and issues that are important to college students; and

• Mobilize higher education in a way that gives more voice to students and makes civic engagement central to student learning.

For more information go to http://www.compact.org/students/scec.html

The Center for Civic Education The Center for Civic Education specializes in civic/citizenship education, law-related education, and international educational exchange programs for developing democracies. Programs focus on the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights; American political traditions and institutions at the federal, state, and local levels; constitutionalism; civic participation; and the rights and responsibilities of citizens. Today, the Center administers a wide range of critically acclaimed curricular, teacher-training, and community-based programs. The principal goals of the Center's programs are to help students develop:

(1) an increased understanding of the institutions of American constitutional democracy and the fundamental principles and values upon which they are founded;

(2) the skills necessary to participate as effective and responsible citizens; and

(3) the willingness to use democratic procedures for making decisions and managing conflict.

Voting is one means by which students participate in government. Students who have studied the Center's We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution Program have registered to vote and actually participated as voters at a much higher percentage than the norm for their age group.

For additional information about Center programs and evaluations on voting go to http://www.civiced.org /programs and http://www.civiced.org/eval_alumni_execsumm.html

The Council for Excellence in Government has written "30 Million Missing Voter: A Candidates Guide to Reaching Young Americans." The publication provides help to candidates so they can dedicate time and resources to younger voters by engaging not only youth, but also adults, the press and media, and schools in the voting process. To download a pdf version of the document go to http://www.excelgov.org/demandcit/yvt/pdf/yvitoolkit.pdf

The John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy was chosen as just one of three sites for gubernatorial debates in Ohio this year. Partnering with four other policy institutes at universities around the state of Ohio, the panelists for the debate (who will pose questions to the candidates) will include five faculty members and five students from these universities. About half the audience for the debate will include students. This opportunity will involve students in a meaningful way in the debate. In addition to the debate between the two leading
candidates, the Institute is sponsoring a separate forum for the
independent candidate for governor in Ohio. Although the Republican
and Democrat candidates left it up to the Institute to determine whether to invite the independent it didn't seem that a meaningful dialogue among three candidates was possible in the hour-long event, so instead they created a separate forum for the independent.

The Institute will sponsor a lunch on campus where the independent candidate will be able to speak both about his platform and about the process of running as a third party candidate. Students will be the
primary invitees at this event. The Institute is very interested in the opportunity that the forum will provide for students to discuss third party candidates. For more information go to http://www.acs.ohio-state.edu/glenninstitute/

The League of Women Voters has two election resources that will benefit many voters, including youth. Their new booklet, Navigating Election Day: What Every Voter Needs to Know, http://www.lwv.org/elibrary/pub/ned.html/ is aimed at first time voters, such as young people. In addition, this is the third year that they will be running a national online voter education service, DemocracyNet or DNet, http://www.dnet.org/that provides a range of information on candidates running for office at all levels of government across the country.

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University received a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to support improvement of the quality and quantity of national election coverage of young adults and the issues that matter to them. Throughout the 2000 presidential campaign, Medill News Service reporters followed the candidates and talked to young people around the country to try to engage Generation Y in political news. Stories were featured in newspapers and on TV stations around the country and on such Web sites as MTV.com, Yahoo! and Studentadvantage.com. all the data and stories are at http://www.yvoteonline.org/

The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, has developed the National Campus Voter Registration Handbook that explains how to plan a voter registration campaign on your campus, and how to build voter education activities for this important election year. Links to the Organizing Handbook as well to all 50 states boards of elections are located at http://www.naicu.edu/

The Univesity of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center's Student Voices Project encourages the civic engagement of young people by bringing the study of a local political campaign into the classroom. Working with school systems throughout the country, the project helps high school students study the issues and candidates in their city's mayoral campaign. Each class formulates a Youth Issues Agenda, reflecting the issues that are of most concern to students and their communities. Students use online news sources to follow the campaign and to research where the candidates stand on issues. Through classroom visits and candidate forums, students raise their concerns directly to candidates and hear what can be done about them. Finally, students communicate their concerns to the general public by making their voices heard in the local news media.

The project is an initiative of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, with funding from the Annenberg Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts. In 2000-2001, the Student Voices Project was implemented in Los Angeles and San Antonio. In 2001-2002, students in Detroit, New York, Newark, Tulsa, and Seattle will participate in Student Voices. Each city has its own Student Voices Web Site, which can be visited by clicking on the map above or selecting from the dropdown menu. For more information go to http://student-voices.org/

The Yale Civic Engagement Project, in conjunction with the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), is conducting a wide range of experiments to find out what interventions increase voter participation and what have little or no impact on voter turnout. Good intentions, hard work, and resources are important, but they are wasted if they are not being funneled toward strategies that will actually produce voters. Let us educate you about phone banks, direct mail, face-to-face conversations, PSAs and more. There's no need to rely on anecdotal evidence or so-called received wisdom, when empirical research is available.

Yale University Political Scientists Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber have conducted experimental studies in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oregon. Studies cited here were conducted in the 1998, 2000, and 2001 election cycles. We are continuing to study partisan and nonpartisan GOTV and voter education programs across the country.

For more information on these studies, go to http://www.yale.edu/isps/publications/voter.html/