For the second year, Alameda Unified School District (AUSD) high school students have teamed up with the League of Women Voters of Alameda [1] (LWVA), a nonpartisan organization that works to protect and expand voting rights, to facilitate a national High School Registration Project aimed at getting more young people to vote.
“Voting is in our DNA and we have a responsibility to share our mission with the next generation,” Linda Bytof, a retired judge, political scientist, and chair of the Youth Outreach Committee [2] of LWVA, told AUSD last year [3]. “We do this by encouraging young voters to get involved, teach them how to get involved, then stand back and watch them put their passion into action.”
[4]Educating students on the power of voting
In the United States, youth can register to vote when they turn 18. In California, students ages 16 and 17 also have the right to pre-register to vote, which allows them to be automatically registered when they turn 18, AUSD reports.
California’s Education Code designates the last two full weeks in April and September as “High School Voter Education Weeks,” a time when schools are encouraged to provide education on the importance of voting and opportunities to register.
According to the AUSD report, research shows that voter turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds has consistently been the lowest of all age groups, and the disparities grow even wider when looking at African-Americans, Latinos, and those with no college experience.
ALWV trains students to lead conversations with their peers about the importance of voting and other issues, as well as how to get them registered. Last year, voter registration events at all four AUSD high schools (including one continuation school and one science and technology institute), one charter, and one private Catholic school registered or pre-registered more than 600 students.
“Crucial constitutional right”
“I chose to lead the voter registration at my school, because I believe that voting is one of the most instrumental ways that one can do to change the realities of the present,” said Genevieve Yuen, a junior at Alameda High School and an organizer of the AHS voter registration drive. “As a member of the League of Women Voters Board and commissioner of the Social Justice Committee at my school, I am very passionate about leading young people my age to become more civically active, because we will be the ones afflicted by others’ decisions if we choose to stay stagnant and silent. I am dedicated to using my position to emphasize the significance to students of exercising their crucial constitutional right.”
Georgia Van Every, the organizer for the Encinal High School event added, “I found myself leading this event because of my knowledge of our school’s past endeavors with the voting registration, but even more so I had a growing interest in the idea of registration. Growing up, my mother ran a lot of women’s Solidarity Sunday events where women would meet up to do online phone calls regarding the 2016 elections. I also vividly remember walking with my parents to some sort of voting poll set up held on the old campus of Encinal where I watched my parents fill out a form and found myself thinking of the power that they had to be able to vote.”
Empowering students through the Student Advisory Committee
The LWV of Alameda’s Student Advisory Committee (SAC) [5] provides students from all Alameda high schools the opportunity to identify issues they care about and develop projects to address them. Under the guidance of LWV mentors, these students take active roles in shaping their communities. Recent projects have included hosting a panel on affordable housing organized last June.
“Youth are historically ignored by politicians because they don’t vote,” Bytof said. “Political science researchers call young people and other underrepresented groups ‘politically invisible’ because politicians and politically engaged volunteers rarely come into contact with this group, potentially leading to policy issues of particular importance to them receiving less attention.”
Students (and adults) can learn more about joining the LWVA on their website [5].