Young people don’t vote, just like they don’t save for retirement at age 21 or worry about interest rates.
That’s what they do because youth isn’t known to plan for the future. Short-term thinking doesn’t give way to wisdom until experience and age prevail. With the excitement of college, or newfound independence and new family obligations for Americans under 30 years old, making voting a priority isn’t on the same level as for the elderly, whose lives are slower in comparison.
Maybe, though, the fault of non-voting millennials lies with the rest of America, as CBS Chicago suggests.
The education system has failed to develop a strong sense of civic duty in Americans, and the problems go beyond schools.
“We don’t only leave young Americans hanging when it comes to educating them about our voting system, we also do a terrible job of teaching news media literacy in high school and college,” Mason Johnson writes.
Shoddy voting machines and voter ID laws that lower voter turnout as voter fraud is a non-issue don’t help voting rates, either.
“So, I guess what I’m saying is, here in America, voting is sort of kind of important. That’s the message we imply when we allow a broken system to fester. That’s the message inferred by 18-year-olds.
‘Here,’ we tell 18-year-olds. ‘Inherit this broken junk.’
… And we’re surprised when they don’t want it? … We’re the ones who created and maintain a broken, biased, gerrymandered and convoluted system,” he writes.
Even with the technical difficulties, a certain pessimism adds to the problem. Young people aren’t always persuaded that their vote will matter. Nor do candidates vie for their attention. If politicians courted the youth vote, more might vote, but politicians don’t chase voting blocs until they have high turnout rates, so they don’t go after young people, because they don’t vote. And so on. It’s a vicious cycle.
The only politicians who chase the youth vote tend to be those who are outside the mainstream. Ron Paul had great success among millennial Republican voters. Bernie Sanders has attracted the vast majority of millennial Democratic voters by speaking to their issues and making them feel like they matter.
For as important as politicians say that voting is, it’s hard for young Americans to believe it when they get treated as afterthoughts.
The consistently low numbers of young voters over decades doesn’t make a youth voting surge likely. The problem is structural. Instead of bemoaning the youth as lazy and apathetic, it’d be a better approach to revamp how Americans understand voting and its value. Or what it means to be American and the duties it comes with.
