10-step Plan to Boost Student Voter Turnout

What can our politicians do?

1. The Federal Government should make Election Day a national holiday

Of the 36 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States is one of just seven that doesn’t designate Election Day as a national holiday. Think about a student who has classes 9 to 3 and work until early evening, picking between finishing their classwork before getting to bed at a decent hour and waiting in a line to vote. Likely there’s no polling location directly on campus. Maybe they don’t have an easy mode of transportation. Certainly that becomes a calculous about the value of his or her single vote. Making Election Day a national holiday wouldn’t make voting mandatory, which Australia, among other countries, deploys. It would, however, remove this tremendous hurdle to voting that we’ve come to accept as our reality for some reason — one that disproportionately impacts younger, busier voters.

2. The government should institute automatic voter registration

Given the nature of American federalism, uncertainty about registration rules sows confusion in the process from the outset. According to a survey, 18-24 year-olds are 3.75 times more likely to move than Americans 40-plus in any given year. That, quite simply, decreases the likelihood of a voter being registered — or even knowing if they can re-register in their new location. In a different survey, young people cite not being registered as the top reason for not voting. According to one estimate, fewer than half under 25 are on the rolls. And even those who seek to vote in their new location might not feel as though they’re able to represent the views or preferences of a local community. One respondent in my survey spoke to this awkward feeling of imposition: “I tend to vote more in national or statewide elections than local ones, as I know I won't be living in my current city for an extended period of time (at least not right now) and I feel like my opinion shouldn't necessarily impact how permanent residents of Ann Arbor live their lives.” Automatic voter registration wouldn’t fix all of these process-based issues, but it would remove arguably the biggest hurdle to youth civic engagement.

But one main reason to implement such a system — and a crucial reason why it’s a political non-starter right now — is that manipulating registration is the easiest way to suppress votes. That includes students, namely out-of-state students. Take this example: In New Hampshire, nearly 60 percent of college students come from outside the state. Politicians, mostly Republican politicians, don’t want these swaths of students from all over the country voting. In 2011, William O’Brien, the state’s Republican House speaker at the time, promised to make changes to restrict student voting. Said O’Brien: “They are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”

3. Candidates need to expand their outreach to more modern avenues

It defies rationality that campaigns today largely mirror those run decades prior. According to a 2017 Pew Research study, 61 percent of young adults use streaming services to watch television, rather than traditional cable or satellite subscription. Yet campaigns still disproportionately spend their money on cable ads; Michael Bloomberg spent nearly half a billion dollars on ads that many voters millennial-aged and younger never see. It’s time to meet 21st-century politicians with 21st-century voters. There are opportunities — often cheaper — on Tik Tok, streaming sites, Snapchat, etc to meet potential younger voters where they are. But these opportunities extend beyond just advertising. What’s stopping a local candidate from running a Zoom Town Hall meeting with a class of students? Why can’t a national candidate make regular Instagram Live appearances, answering questions as they come in? In a 2015 Harvard Institute of Politics poll, only one in three 18-24 year-olds surveyed agreed with the statement, “Voting is a part of who I am.” If you leave a chasm between how candidates campaign and where people live their day-to-day lives, they’ll undoubtedly feel divorced from the political process.

4. Create an interactive, actionable how-to guide for voting 

Sometimes, the process of simply determining how to vote can overwhelm. In one study, researchers saw an increased turnout of 4.1% — and up to 9.1% for single-voter eligible households — just by asking voters questions like what time they would vote, where they would be coming from, and what they would be doing beforehand. There should be a government database where you enter your name and information, and it gives you an actionable, easy-to-read, interactive plan to vote. If you could direct a confused or overwhelmed voter to one simple website to provide that information, you’d undoubtedly increase voting, especially among younger voters who may have never voted before.

5. Student voting is a self-fulfilling prophecy; when politicians see young people as valuable voting coalitions, they will vote

It has now become a political truism: Millennials are the first generation expected to be worse off than their parents. College students today will, in all likelihood, never collect social security despite continuing to pay into it. Does it make sense, then, that the widening gap of income inequality has pushed younger voters to seek massive economic reforms — i.e. Democratic Socialism? Millennials will be the first generation forced to confront the existential threat of climate change. Does it make sense, then, that millennials and Gen X’ers see reconstructive policies like the Green New Deal register as necessary in order to reverse that course? Yet these are still deemed radical and outlandish within a political mainstream dominated by — and I’ll be frank — old, white men who operate a certain way because that’s how things work around here. Over 62 percent of voters in my survey responded that they moderately or strongly agree with the statement: “Politicians ignore the preferences of younger voters.” There is a bubbling cynicism about this. Young voters are not a monolith; certainly not all adhere to the ideas of Democratic Socialism or Democratic policies at all. But by understanding that they are, broadly, different than the generations that have come before them — that they have different priorities, different imperatives, different fears — we can begin to understand why they do not feel valued by the government.

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What we can do:

1. Organize social media campaigns

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Instagram started a mass story feature for “Stay At Home” photos and videos. It was one feature the social media app used “to help those practicing social distancing connect with others.” Certainly it could — and should — do the same for voting. A mass “I Voted” story, sharing in one place friends who post “I Voted” stickers in different ways could help spread collective understanding in normalizing voting. A 2007 study found that telling people that voting is common increased the number of individuals who said they intended to vote by 5.45 percent. Normalizing voting as a more abundant activity among peers — in a medium that occupies their daily lives — will help boost the belief that “this is something I should do, too.”

2. Create peer incentives to vote

No one likes the holier-than-thou social media poster who wants to flex their own intellect by trying to impose their politics on others. Having said that, there are ways to incentivize voting without trying to impose a belief system or a sense of elitism. Professors can offer extra credit for one class hitting a 75 percent voting threshold, local restaurants can offer deals to those with proof of their voting, athletic departments can offer free or reduced-price tickets with proof of voting, etc. There are any number of peer- and business-led voting incentives that would undoubtedly have an impact on voting statistics. The Big Ten Voting Challenge, created in 2017, is a prime example of mobilizing in a way that is effective — voting participation in the conference’s 14 schools spiked to 43 percent in the 2018 midterm, more than double its rate in the 2014 midterm elections.

3. Start campus art campaigns

Voting should be an expression of hope, not simply an act of compulsion. What better place to bottle that hope and turn it into energy than a college campus, where possibilities truly are endless. Consider the prospect of art students designing “Instagram-able”, civically-engaged art, and spreading it around campus prior to an election. Organizations like “Rock The Vote” have tapped into an ability to fuse engagement with art, music, technology and culture to boost turnout in younger generations.

4. Host Election Day parties

Take the initiative to organize a “meet-the-candidate” party. Gather friends to watch election returns. The crux of student antipathy to voting lies in identifying with the process. We create this dichotomous dilemma: Are you a voter? Are you not a voter? Too many people are too ashamed — for a host of reasons outlined in this project — to publicly identify as the latter. But a low percentage truly identify with the former. Introducing them into the political process in a casual way can do wonders toward engaging passive voters, without heavy-handedly insisting they vote.

5. Talk. Listen. Engage.

At risk of invoking some sort of Aaron Sorkin-esque soliloquy about the wonders of a healthy democracy, we can only make change by empathizing, organizing and mobilizing. Creating that change starts on a granular level. Talk to friends and family about their lives and why civic engagement matters. Listen to people you disagree with. Explain why you disagree. Educate yourself. Help educate others (without being pompous). A country that roots itself on valuing the opinion of its youth is a country being proactive rather than reactive. That doesn’t come to fruition by dragging students to the polls against their will. It starts with understanding them.