Poll: Millennials believe only well-informed Americans should vote

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A new survey is offering another suggestion for low millennial voter turnout during the 2014 midterm elections — ill-informed voters.

The latest Huffington Post/YouGov poll finds that only 28 percent of  millennials believe everyone should cast a ballot in elections. Instead, 60 percent believe that only well-informed voters should participate.

This is in direct contrast to their older counterparts. Most Americans age 45 and over say everyone should vote, according to the survey.

“The results don’t startle me,” said Peter Levine, director of Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, told the Huffington Post. “I’ve often encountered young people who say that the reason they don’t think they personally should vote is they’re not well-informed, and they take that as kind of a moral position that they’re not really qualified to vote.”

Millennials made up just about 13 percent of total voters in this year’s elections. This is down from 19 percent in 2012, but not too much lower than other non-presidential elections.  Since 1994, the percentage of young voters in a midterm has run between 11 and 13 percent.

While this is low, Levine said that at least this means the millennial electorate is informed on the issues though they might be  “putting themselves through too stringent a test, knocking out some people who are informed enough.”

Katerina Esther Rosen, a 20-year-old student at Vanderbilt, told the Huffington Post that she believes the culture around voting it changing. Older generations consider it an integral part of being an American, but most young people she knows don’t.

“I didn’t grow up saying, ‘Just wait till you’re 18 and you can finally vote and do your civic duty.’ It wasn’t really a big part of my childhood,” she said. “I really do feel like that’s fading, and maybe that’s why older people vote, because they do feel that it is their duty. Younger people don’t, because it’s not so much part of the culture anymore.”

Cliff Zukin, a political science professor at Rutgers University, agreed with this assessment.

The norms “that a good citizen pays attention and votes have been weakening with each generation,” he told HuffPo. “So by now most young people see it as a choice rather than a duty. Most feel there are few if any affirmative obligations of citizenship.”