EDITORIAL: College students need to be involved in the electoral process
As Bernie Sanders has marched toward the Democratic presidential nomination, the ghost of George McGovern, the party’s 1972 standard bearer, has been summoned in more than one quarter, usually to point to ideological common ground or to warn that Sanders could face a thrashing in November on a par with McGovern’s.
In an America that has become enormously more polarized over the last half-century, it seems unlikely that Sanders will be buried in a 49-state landslide no matter how risky his candidacy seems to many Democrats. Sanders will be crossing his fingers for a high turnout of young voters, as McGovern also was all those years ago, but McGovern’s hopes were for naught – despite 18-year-olds getting the right to vote just the year before, they didn’t turn out in sufficient numbers to get him anywhere near the Oval Office. In fact, it stands to reason that many of them voted for President Richard Nixon, who was then widely popular.
Despite the push to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 during the days of the Vietnam War and campus protests, young voters have never turned out at levels matching older adults. The nadir could well have been reached in 1996, when 70% of 18- to-24-year-olds did not vote in that year’s presidential election. Turnout has improved among young people more recently, but it’s still not as good as it could be.
Pennsylvania is trying to change that. Last week, Kathy Boockvar, the commonwealth’s secretary of state, unveiled the Pennsylvania Campus Voting Challenge, a nonpartisan voter turnout competition among college and university campuses.
Participating campuses will compete in three categories: highest voter turnout, most improved turnout and highest rate of registration for the November election. Winners will be determined by data from the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
Boockvar said the contest “encourages young Pennsylvanians to participate fully in our democracy,” and that our democracy’s future “depends on cultivating informed and engaged citizens.” It would be ideal if young people participated in the electoral process simply because so many of the issues at stake will directly affect them, from climate change and income inequality to the fate of our increasingly beleaguered democracy. But if it takes a contest to boost turnout, then so be it.
At the very least, Pennsylvania is taking steps to improve turnout among college and university students. The same cannot be said in other states, where lawmakers – mostly Republican – have tried to place roadblocks between young people and the voting booth. The New York Times reported in October how officials in Florida, Texas, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin have gone out of their way to make it harder for students to vote through restrictive voter ID laws, requirements that newly registered voters get driver’s licenses and auto registrations, doing away with early-voting sites at campuses and other shenanigans.
The motive is clear. William O’Brien, New Hampshire’s House speaker, proclaimed in 2011 that he wanted to curtail voting by young people who are, in his words, “voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience.”
Rather than trying to prevent them from voting, folks like O’Brien should be encouraging young people to vote. That, in fact, could well be a valuable first step in winning them over.