In light of declining support for mainstream politicians among young voters Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.Massachusetts), and Rep. Nikema Williams, (D.Georgia), have introduced a bill that aims to greatly expand youth voting access.
Young voters consistently have the lowest voter turnoutAll age groups. Even in 2020, young voters will still be eligible to vote turned outOnly about half of those aged 18 to 29 voted in the highest number since the dawn of the 21st-century. 75 percentOf those aged 65 and older, they voted. The turnout was 67% among all eligible voters.
Warren and Williams are determined to change that. The Youth Voting Rights ActIt would enforce the 26th Amendment which lowers the voting age to 18 by designating colleges or universities as voter registration agents and requiring them have polling places on campus. It would allow 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds to preregister to voter, which is already possible allowed in many statesAll states must accept student identifications as valid voter IDs.
The bill would also establish a grant program to increase participation of young people in elections, and direct the federal governments to study youth voter registration.
“Voting is the beating heart of our democracy,” Warren saidIn a statement. “Young people are the future of America, and with voting rights under attack across the country, we must do everything we can to ensure they can exercise their right to vote.”
Voting rights advocates claim that allowing people to use student IDs to vote could vastly improve young people’s access to voting. The meantime, vast majority of colleges don’t have polling places on campus, placing a barrier to voting for many young students.
This problem is getting worse. Far right conservatives have taken aim at college campuses polling places; in Texas, lawmakers outlawed polling places that didn’t stay open for the entirety of the state’s early voting period, closing several polling places on campuses that logged thousands of votes from students.
Young people tend to lean more left than their older counterparts, and this is a consistent trend. vote forDemocrats are a key group in the party. Republicans have been strategically trying to suppressThe youth vote views young voters as a threat and sees them as a threat.
It may not suffice to just aim to get young people to vote, without promising transformative change, to increase voter turnout. Young voters are increasingly more progressive than previous generations and are beginning to reject offerings by mainstream Democrats, especially as obstruction from Democrats themselves jams up progress from within Congress and party leaders do little to address issues that young people feel strongly about, such as the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade.
For instance, approval of President Joe Biden has been particularly low among young voters.
A survey of Democratic voters from New York Times/Siena College released on Monday, only 64 percent said they’d vote for Biden in the primaries in 2024, while a whopping 94 percent of Democrats under 30 said that they would vote for another Democrat to replace Biden after his first term is over. This despite the fact that nearly 60 percentMany young voters voted for Biden in 2020 over Donald Trump. The poll found that if the election were to be held today, they would still choose Trump.
The same poll was taken on July 5th through July 7th. found that only 1 percent of voters between 18 and 29 said they “strongly” approve of Biden’s job performance, and only 19 percent overall said they approve – the lowest rating of any age group. Among young voters who said that they’d vote for someone other than Biden, 20 percent said that it would be primarily because he’s not progressive enough.
