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Why Voting Doesn't Work for Young People · The Fine Print of Democracy

• Jake: Welcome to the Fine Print of Democracy, a civics podcast that explores the overlooked rules, processes, and institutions that shape American government. I'm Jake, a civics teacher, breaking down the ideas behind our system of government and the conversations that help us better understand it. Every Monday I publish an essay exploring a big idea in civics, politics, government, or history. In these episodes, I'll read that week's essay, then continue with margin notes, a look at the ideas, stories, and reflections that didn't quite make it into the final draft. Today, why voting doesn't work for young people? Why voting doesn't work for young people? Participation falls short when the system makes it harder to show up. Every election cycle there's a familiar complaint. Young people just don't vote. They're called apathetic, disengaged, uninterested. But that explanation is too easy, and honestly, it misses the real problem. Young people do care about issues. You can see it in protests, social media, and the causes they rally around. The problem isn't interest, it's participation. Young people don't vote at lower rates because they care less about politics. They vote less because the system makes it harder for them to participate. Voting is simple if you've done it before. If you haven't, it can be confusing. Twenty four states have automatic voter registration, less than half of the country, and of the states that don't have automatic voter registration, registering to vote can be very confusing, especially if you are new to a state, like young voters so often are. Eighteen to twenty four year olds are the people most often in college, moving to start a career or family, or just simply not settled down yet. And when they move states, registering to vote is not usually one of the first things that comes to mind when making sure all the important parts of moving are taken care of. Come election time, these young voters will realize they never registered to vote, and in many states it's now too late. More than half of the country does not allow same day voter registration, meaning young voters who forgot to register in the chaos of moving states won't be able to vote. Voter registration rules are confusing. Lawyers go to school for years to become experts in voter registration. How can we expect a college student to already be familiar with the voting rules in a state they just moved to? There are two other main reasons why youth voter turnout is so low. One, voting is a habit, and habits take time to build. Older voters vote because they've always voted. Young voters are still forming that pattern. And two, campaigns focus on people who already vote. That means young voters often get less outreach, less contact, and fewer reminders. Should young people vote more? Yes, of course, but we can't fault them completely. The system, consciously or subconsciously, has put barriers in their way. There are systemic changes that can be made, and there are also smaller changes that local groups, parties, and candidates can make. Let's start with the bigger systemic changes. The United States allows individual states, counties, and cities the right to organize their own elections. This means there are thousands of different rules and regulations across the country. In the partisan world we live in now, this would be near impossible, but a nationwide voter registration and election laws could eliminate many barriers for young people voting. For example, a national same day voter registration law, allowing people who moved recently, just turned 18, or simply forgot to register to vote on or close to election day. This would have a significant impact because many young people are tuned out of politics and only think about it when it's close to the election and there is no escaping it. And often, by that point, it is too late to register. Allowing voters to register close to or on election day will increase voter turnout. Another systemic change that could be made but likely won't, expanded early voting and vote by mail or absentee voting. Having one single election day makes sense. There needs to be a deadline, but forcing everyone to vote on that one single day presents its own challenges. Young people often can't get off work, or can't afford to take off work, to wait in line for hours and hours on a random Tuesday. Expanded early voting solves this twofold. It gives voters more options to go to the polls, including on the weekend when they are already likely not working, and it cuts down on the time spent waiting in line. Let's look at a hypothetical example. Town A has a population of 25,000 people and only two polling locations. If all 25,000 people tried to vote on the same day, the lines at these two polling locations would be hours long. Retired voters or voters with more seniority at their job can afford to spend their Tuesday waiting in line. Young people cannot. Let's instead say this town has early voting for seven days before election day. A young voter may stop by on Thursday during their lunch break, and if the line is short, they can vote and be back to work before their lunch break is over. Or make election day a federal holiday. Give people the day off specifically to go to their local polling place and vote. Some companies are doing this on their own, either giving PTO for employees on Election Day or having a meeting free day, so employees can leave during the day to vote without fear of missing something important. Patagonia, along with PayPal and Levi Strauss, have spearheaded this initiative, encouraging their employees to vote, bringing in speakers to educate their employees about their rights, and even shutting down their offices, warehouses, and stores so all employees are able to vote. Similarly, expanded vote by mail can increase all voter turnout, not just among the youth. According to a Tufts University study in the 2022 midterm election, The ten states with the highest youth voter turnout, every single one of them had either all vote by mail or non excuse absentee voting. This is not a coincidence. Like mentioned above, young people often can't get off work to go to a voting location, but voting by mail is something they can do when they get home from work, in the morning before work, while watching a movie on the couch, even in their car on the way to the post office the day before election day to drop off their ballot, while parked, of course, no voting and driving. Eight states have a hundred percent vote by mail election, and despite the talking points, they are extremely safe and secure. Twenty-eight states have no excuse absentee voting, meaning if you send a message to the Secretary of State, you will receive a ballot in the mail. a nationwide or even just more individual states vote by mail law would increase all voter turnout, especially the youth vote. The youth often see voting as an inconvenience, something that takes them away from what they want to do or need to do. We should be making voting easier for them, not harder. Alright, enough of the pie in the sky voting goals. Here's what local election groups and candidates can do to increase the youth vote. We must meet young voters where they are, literally and figuratively. Local groups and candidates must explain to young voters why voting will impact them, why it is important. Young people often think politicians don't listen or don't care, so showing them that good politicians do care and voting can improve their life and their future will encourage them to vote because they see a point to it. There is an actual reason. We can talk about issues that matter to young people. Are Social Security and Medicare important? Absolutely, but that is not front of mind for young voters. Knowing your audience is important for increasing turnout in all age groups. Speak to what matters to the voters. Give them a reason to engage. For example, the cost of living is important for younger generations. Many of them know they may never own a house or have kids because they just can't afford it. So develop plans to address this issue. Explain it to young voters, and then, and this is very important, actually follow through. Show them that if they participate and elect who they want, good changes can come. Meeting young voters where they are also means literally going to where young voters are, high schools and colleges. Have voter registration days for seniors in high school. Have a table set up at the welcome fair for freshman orientation at colleges. Eliminating the step of researching how to register to vote and bringing the registration to the voters eliminates a huge hurdle to voting. No matter your opinions, right or wrong, social media is here to stay. So why not use it to your advantage? Local election groups can use social media to promote registration rules and laws. Candidates can use social media to connect with younger generations and spread their message and name recognition. Social media influencers, especially ones not in the political sphere, can be a valuable asset. Nonpartisan election groups can and should partner with social media influencers to spread the word about voting. They're called influencers for a reason. They influence people. If a non-engaged person sees their favorite influencer talking about voting, they'll be encouraged to check their registration status, go to the voting location on election day, or request an absentee ballot. Similarly, young generations are social people, so let's make voting a social experience. Take Australia, for example. In the 2025 federal election, Australia had voter turnout of more than 90%, unheard of in America. Australia has compulsory voting for all eligible citizens, which obviously increases voter turnout. But we can still learn from Australia even without implementing compulsory voting. Across the country, local groups make voting a social gathering, and the number one feature of these events, democracy sausage. Come to the polling location, vote in the election, get a sausage, and hang out with friends. Elections in Australia are held on Saturday, further encouraging voting. In Australia, they make voting easy and fun. We can take the idea of making voting a social event and implement it in America. Voting becomes more likely when it is seen as something people like me do. Turning a polling location into a mini fair, sell food, or give it away. Young people love free food. Have games to play after voting, hire a clown to entertain people in line, even a face painter to paint I voted on people's cheeks. Take it one step further, hire a local band or artist to perform out front of a polling location. This works best for states with in-person voting, but it can work for vote by male states too. Set this up around a ballot drop box. Encourage people to come to a location and fill out their ballot together, or in private voting booths, and then immediately drop them in a ballot drop box, and then eat some food, paint their face, and listen to music. Make voting fun and young people will turn out. There isn't one single problem with one single solution, as great as that would be. Voting wasn't built with young voters in mind. It's shaped by habits that take time to form, rules that can make participation harder, and campaigns that focus on voters who already show up. Young people care. That is evidenced by the protests we see across the country, the posts they make on social media. We don't need to talk down to young people and ask them to step up and participate. We need the political groups and candidates to step up, to make voting easier and fun, something that has a purpose. Even something as simple as the I voted sticker can play a role. People like being part of something, and small social signals like that can make voting feel more visible and more normal. The solutions aren't complicated. We've already seen what works. The challenge is choosing to actually implement them. We've spent a lot of time asking more from young people. It might be time to expect more from the system itself. Writing essays always means making choices. Every essay leaves a few thoughts in the margins, ideas that didn't quite fit, stories that deserved a little more room, or questions worth exploring a little further. So let's spend a few minutes there. Welcome to Margin Notes, where we go beyond the finished essay and take a closer look at the ideas behind it. There's one idea from this post that I keep coming back to. Voting is a habit. That sounds almost too simple, but I think it explains more than we give it credit for. Some for someone who has voted in 10, 15, or 20 elections, checking their registration, figuring out where to vote, requesting a ballot or remembering election day can become almost automatic. It is just something they do. For an 18-year-old voting for the first time, none of it is automatic yet. There's a whole series of little decisions that have to happen before a ballot ever gets cast. And habits don't appear out of nowhere. You have to do something a few times before it starts to feel routine. That matters because we sometimes compare a young voter who has never participated in an election with a 60-year-old who has been voting for four decades and act as though they're starting from the same place. They aren't. One person has years of experience navigating the process. The other may still be figuring out what a primary election is when they need to register where their polling place is and whether they can vote by mail. That doesn't mean young voters shouldn't take responsibility for learning those things. It does mean the first experience matters though. If your first interaction with an election is confusing, inconvenient, or easy to miss, it becomes harder to establish the habit in the first place. And there's there is some interesting evidence behind this. Tufts University's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or Circle, did some research on the 2022 election and found that among young people who didn't vote, 38% said they forgot or were too busy. 21% said they didn't have enough information about the candidates or voting process. And in 9% reported problems with in-person voting or their absentee ballot. Among young people who weren't registered, 37% cited either time or information barriers. A third of young nonvoters said they didn't vote because it didn't matter to them, which is a whole other issue that needs to be addressed at some point as well. But that doesn't mean every young non-voter secretly wanted to vote and was prevented from doing so. People have plenty of reasons for not participating. But it does make the blanket explanation of young people are apathetic look pretty incomplete. There's another part of this that I find especially interesting, moving. We tend to think of moving as a personal life event. You pack your stuff, change your address, find a new job or school, figure out where the grocery store is, and you're eventually settled. But for a young voter, moving can also mean entering an entirely different election system. Different registration deadlines, different identification rules, different options for voting early, different rules for absentee ballots. Circle has found that young people are particularly affected by this because they are more likely to move and are often registering for the first time. In states without automatic online or same day registration, young people were more likely to report missing registration deadlines or not knowing how to register. Think about how strange that is from the perspective of a first time voter. You could live in one state your entire childhood, graduate from high school, move 300 miles away from college, and suddenly the process you thought you understood is no longer the process you need to follow. The fact that you successfully registered once doesn't necessarily mean you are automatically registered at your new address. That gets us something bigger than just youth voting. We talk about American elections as though there's one American voting system, and there really isn't. There are thousands of election jurisdictions operating under different state laws and local procedures. An 18 or 19-year-old who moves from one state to another isn't just moving to a new apartment. They may be learning a new set of rules for participating in democracy. And that makes me think the most interesting question isn't necessarily why don't young people vote. It might be how much work are we asking someone to do before they can participate? That question also helps explain why some of the seemingly small reforms discussed in the post matter. Same-day registration, online registration, early voting, and vote by mail aren't magic solutions to youth turnout. But they can remove individual points where someone can get confused, run out of time, or simply forget. And sometimes those little points of friction matter more than we even realize. Now imagine that that voting requires ten steps. Most people can get through all ten. But if if a young voter doesn't know about step four, moves before step six, misses a deadline at step seven, and doesn't receive any reminder because the campaign never contacted them, The final result still looks like They didn't vote. The ballot box doesn't tell us why someone didn't make it there. is one reason I think the distinction between interest and participation is important. We tend to measure the second one because it is easier to count. We can count ballots, we can calculate turnout, we can compare one age group to another. Participation is easy to count. Interest is much harder to measure. A person can spend hours reading about housing costs, student debt, Climate policy, gun policy, taxes, foreign affairs, or any other political issue, and still never cast their ballot. Now, from the perspective of the election results, that person is simply a non-voter. The system doesn't record the fact that they cared about the election but never quite made it through the process of participating. And there's another wrinkle here. Young voters aren't one permanent group. Someone who is 18 or 19 is having a very different experience from someone who is 28. Circle's 2022 data found that. Voters aged 18 to 19 had lower turnouts than voters aged 20 to 29. That makes sense when you think about the number of people entering the electorate for the first time at 18. They're not just young versions of experienced voters, they're literally learning how the system works for the very first time. In a way, that makes the first few elections especially important. The goal isn't simply to get someone to vote once. Ideally, that first experience becomes the beginning of a pattern. Register, vote, learn a little more, vote again, get more comfortable with the process. And eventually it becomes something you don't have to think very hard about. what a habit actually looks like. The campaign piece is interesting for a different reason, though. Campaigns are not just responding to voters, they're also helping create the environment in which people decide whether voting is worth their time in the first place. Circle found that about 54% of young people were contacted by a political party or organization about the 2022 election. Young people who said they were contacted were 29 percentage points more likely to report voting. Than those who weren't contacted. That doesn't necessarily mean a campaign phone call magically turns a nonvoter into a voter. People who are already interested in politics may be more likely to answer campaigns' outreach in the first place. So we shouldn't treat that 29-point difference as proof that outreach itself caused the difference. But it does raise an interesting question about a feedback loop. Campaigns contact people who vote. People who get contacted may be more likely to vote. Campaigns see that those people vote, so campaigns contact them again in the future. Meanwhile, the people who don't vote are contacted less often, which means they receive fewer reminders and less information about how to participate. That can become a self-reinforcing cycle. And there's another reason outreach matters. Sometimes the most useful message from a campaign isn't actually about the candidate themselves. It might be here's how to register, or here's when registration closes, or here's where you can vote early, or even you moved recently, so check your registration before election day. Those aren't particularly exciting campaign messages, but for someone who is unfamiliar with the process, they might be more useful than another argument about a candidate's policy positions. Turnout is sometimes more effective than persuasion. That is especially interesting because we often think of campaigns as competing to persuade voters. But some of their work is more basic than persuasion. Before you can convince someone to vote for you, you have to convince them to participate at all. Then there's the Australian democracy sausage, which might be my favorite example in the entire post. Australia's system is obviously very different from ours. Voting is compulsory, it's mandatory, and federal elections are held on Saturdays. They have the day off work. The Australian Electoral Commission estimated turnout at around 90% for the 2025 federal election. So Australia isn't a perfect model for the United States. You can't look at Australia's turnout and conclude that Americans simply need to. copy one particular part of the Australian system, but the the sausage isn't really about compulsory voting anyway. The interesting part is the culture surrounding the election itself. Voting can be something you do with other people. You go to the polling place together, you cast your ballot, you grab some food and hang around for a while. The election becomes an event rather than another chore competing for your attention. And that gets back to something I think is easy to overlook when we talk about young voters. Participation is partly social. People are influenced by what they see other people doing. If everyone around you votes, voting feels normal. If your friends are talking about the election, your coworkers mention when they're going to vote, and your family has always treated election day as something you participate in, voting becomes part of the culture around you. If none of that is happening, voting can feel like something other people do. This is where the idea of making voting more social becomes more interesting than it initially sounds. It doesn't have to mean turning an election into a party or trying to make politics into entertainment. It can be as simple as creating more opportunities for people to see participation happening around them. That might be a vote or registration table at a college orientation. It might be a reminder from a favorite local organization. It might be a group of friends deciding to go vote together. It might even be that little I voted sticker. I actually like that sticker more than I expected to when I first started writing this piece. It's a tiny thing. It doesn't make registration easier. It doesn't shorten a line. It doesn't explain the ballot, but It is visible. You vote and then you walk around with a little reminder that you participated. Somebody else sees it. Maybe they ask you about it. Maybe they remember it today's election day or election day is coming up. Maybe it simply reinforces the idea that voting is something people like them do. That last part is important. We often talk about civic participation as an individual responsibility. You should register. You should learn about the candidates. You should vote. And those are true, but democracy is also a social system. People learn how to participate by watching other people participate. Communities can either make civic participation feel normal or make it feel like something unusual that requires extra effort. And that is where I think the phrase young people don't vote can actually become misleading. Young people do vote, millions in fact. Circle estimated that about 23% of eligible 18 to 29 year olds voted in the 2022 midterms. And that was one of the higher youth voter turnout levels. For midterm elections in decades. The problem is that participation is uneven. And the youngest voters are often the ones still figuring out how to enter the system. So, so maybe the better question here isn't whether young people are voters, it's whether they've made it easy enough for them to become voters. That distinction matters because young voters aren't going to stay young forever. The 18-year-old who is figuring out how to register today eventually becomes a 25-year-old who knows exactly what to do. person who has to remember election day today may eventually become the person reminding somebody else to vote tomorrow. We're talking about the formation of a long-term civic habit. None of this is going to solve youth turnout by itself, but that's really the point of this whole argument. There probably isn't one thing that will. The problem is a collection of small obstacles, habits, expectations, and incentives. And if that's the problem, then maybe the answer isn't finding one revolutionary way to get young people to vote. Maybe it's removing as many of those obstacles as we can. And maybe it's also recognizing that participation isn't something people simply decide to have, it's something people learn. Voting is one of the basic ways people participate in their government. It shouldn't be surprising that people need some help learning how to do it. Because if we want voting to become a habit, people have to be given a reasonable chance to build the habit in the first place. We teach people how to drive, we teach people how to apply for college, we teach people how to navigate all kinds of systems that are complicated the first time you encounter them. So why don't we teach people how to participate politically and vote? Every idea has more than one side, every decision has more than one perspective, and every conversation leaves us with more to consider. Understanding democracy means being willing to keep asking questions. Remember, civics is something you keep learning, not something you finish. There's always another rule, institution, or piece of history to understand. Thanks for listening to the Fine Print of Democracy.