Education Week - October 21, 2020 - 16

CITIZEN Z

Casting Their First Ballots, Teen Voters
Confront Pandemic's Barriers
Coronavirus poses
added challenges
for those working
to get out the vote

Laura Hermosilla's first time voting
won't be at all how she pictured it.
"I always wanted to vote in-person
for the first time," said Laura, an
18-year-old high school senior from
Tucson, Ariz., who will instead cast
her vote through a mail-in ballot,
joining millions of Americans who
will shift the way they vote as the
nation continues to grapple with the
COVID-19 pandemic.
But Hermosilla won't stay home
on Election Day. Instead, she plans
to don two layers of face masks to
volunteer as a poll worker, taking a
spot that may have previously been
occupied by an older, more medically
at-risk volunteer.
She is part of a movement of young
volunteers around the country who've
committed to getting their peers to
vote. While some of them are too
young to vote themselves, they say the
same pandemic that has made it more
difficult to participate in the election
this year has also made politics more
personal for their classmates.
Growing youth-fueled political
movements, like March for Our Lives
and Black Lives Matter, combined
with savvy social media strategies,
have stirred hopes that the youngest
voters will turn out in greater numbers
for the 2020 presidential election,
breaking years-long trends of relatively low participation among their
age group.
But continued efforts to contain the
spread of the coronavirus have shut
down many schools, eliminating a key
venue for in-person registration and
discussions about voting for many students. And concerns about the virus
have led to new interest in voting by
mail, which adds a challenge for newly
engaged citizens who may already be
daunted by electoral logistics.

Making Politics Personal
High school volunteers say those
conditions are as motivating as they
are challenging. They've seen firsthand how the decisions from elected
leaders at all levels-ranging from
school board members and county
commissioners to members of Congress and the president-have affected their ability to return to their
classrooms, to play sports, and to
access coronavirus testing in their
communities.
"Our peers seem to think politics is this crazy circus show," said

Julia Robinson for Education Week

By Evie Blad

Austin Teen Coalition Co-Founders
Mainur Khan, left, and Zach Moser,
right, both 17-year-old seniors
at Round Rock High School in
Round Rock, Texas, are unable to
vote in this year's presidential
election but have energized their
peers and have registered more
than 100 voters.

We know that
young people are
more likely to vote
if they vote for the
first time when they
are 18. If you see
your parents voting,
if you see it in
school, if you hold
mock elections
in school, you are
prepared to do that.
CRYSTAL CARSON
Vice president of communications,
When We All Vote

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 21, 2020 | www.edweek.org

Mainur Khan, a high school senior
from Round Rock, Texas. "They
turn on the TV and hear people
yelling all the time. But what we've
experienced in the last nine months
has shown how important it is to get
out to the ballot box."
Khan and his classmate, Zach
Moser, both 17 and ineligible to vote
this year, started an effort called Austin Teen Coalition shortly after their
school switched to remote learning
last spring.
After seeing their peers speculating
on social media about the efficacy of
face masks, the federal response to the
virus, and whether their school would
open its building before the summer
break, the duo conducted a video interview with their school superintendent.
In the months since, they've interviewed mayors, congressional candidates, activists, and city council
members, posting the videos online
for their peers to watch. In the weekend before Texas' Oct. 5 deadline, they
held a drive-thru voter registration effort and helped 103 people fill out the
paper forms. First in line: one of dozens of high school students.
"Even if only one person showed up,
it would have been worth it to help that
one person," Moser said.
The Texas teens' efforts are a
little more spontaneous than larger,
more-organized strategies that
have also engaged teens around the
country.
Researchers have found that a person's likelihood of voting gets stronger with each election they participate in. So encouraging young people
to vote isn't just about this election,
it's about building a pattern of lifelong civic engagement.

"Voting is habit forming," said
Aaron Weinschenk, a political science
professor at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. "Once you can get
people on board, they keep doing it."

Low Participation
United States voter participation
rates lag behind many other countries',
and the youngest eligible citizens have
historically participated at much lower
levels than older generations.
Americans ages 18 to 29 were the
only age group to increase turnout
between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, the U.S. Census Bureau
reported. But, at 46 percent, they still
had a significantly lower turnout rate
than older age groups, like the 45- to
64-year-olds, who had a 67 percent
turnout rate.
Advocates say political campaigns
often target their youth efforts to college campuses, where they can reach
larger numbers of students more effectively. That can leave some young
students without the support they say
they need to register and to actually
make it to the polls.
In the 2018 midterms, for example,
overall voter participation surged
compared to 2014 levels. But only 23
percent of eligible voters under the age
of 20 cast a ballot, reported the Center
for Information on Civic Learning and
Engagement at Tufts University, also
known as CIRCLE.
In a September analysis, the organization reported a growth in voter registration among 18- to 24-year-olds. But,
in 21 of the 27 states with updated data,
registration rates for 18- and 19-yearold voters lagged behind 2016 levels,
found the analysis, which predated national Voter Registration Day efforts.

And it's not necessarily a lack of political interest that keeps young people
from the polls. In surveys, teens have
reported barriers like knowing when
and how to register and how to identify their polling location.
The pandemic also has raised some
new practical concerns. In a July youth
survey by CIRCLE, about a quarter of
participants said they didn't know
where to get information about mailin voting.
That's why educators' efforts to
build civic engagement shouldn't
focus narrowly on high-profile political
issues and top-of-the-ticket races, said
Weinschenk, the Wisconsin professor.
He cited a 2017 study, in which
University of Virginia Professor John
Holbein found that children who participated in a social-emotional learning program in 1992 were more likely
to vote than their peers in a control
group. That may be because they had
more persistence or a greater sense of
social responsibility, Weinschenk said.

Logistical Hurdles
In the shorter term, students also
need practical advice about how to participate, said Crystal Carson, vice president of communications for When
We All Vote, a nonpartisan organization founded by former first lady Michelle Obama. The group's My School
Votes campaign organized more than
20,000 students and teachers this year
to help demystify voting for their peers
- and sometimes for their parents, too.
"We know that young people are
more likely to vote if they vote for
the first time when they are 18," Carson said. "If you see your parents
voting, if you see it in school, if you
hold mock elections in school, you

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Education Week - October 21, 2020

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