Voting Early & Often
California has no shortage of problems. One problem in particular that does not bode well for the future is this: young voters, tomorrow's leaders, are staying away from the polls in droves. Almost half of California's eligible voters in the critical 18-24 age bracket are not registered to vote.
There is no magic wand that will solve this problem overnight. But there are steps we can take toward the ultimate goal of encouraging and ensuring participation in the heart of the democratic process.
One potential solution is now sitting on the desk of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The California Legislature recently approved AB 30, a bill that would lower the voter registration age to 17. Lowering the registration age, not the voting age, would allow students to get involved in the democratic process at an earlier point in their lives and a critical stage in their development. It would also allow high schools to become more actively engaged in the real world process of civic education.
"Good Government" groups appear to be unanimous in their support of this concept. Some members of the public, though, have misunderstood this proposal and equate it with lowering the voting age. One person contacted New America with this comment:
"Eighteen is too young to vote period! We should go back to 21. Eighteen year olds are profoundly immature and are easily seduced by any politician promising anything that sounds like fun. No one who has never held a full time job should be allowed to vote!"
Perhaps 18 year olds would not be so "easily seduced by any politician promising anything" if they had some civic education under their belts and not only studied the political process but actually had experience participating in it before they took their turns at the ballot box.
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"easily seduced" not limited to youth by any means.....
For the past month I have been working with a grassroots campaign for LA City Council, a race which had a few extremely well funded candidates, and several barely funded candidates. My experience with directly talking to hundreds of voters in a very condensed period via phone calls and face-to-face conversations has clearly illustrated to me that the youth in general is no more "easily seduced" than every single other demographic--in fact it may well be the opposite.
Since the candidate I was volunteering for had little money, his name was not known to the thousands of voters who received several mailers from the big-money candidates. A massive majority of the people I talked to had no interest whatsoever in learning about a candidate they had not already heard of--they had already chosen based purely on what came in their mailboxes. If that is not "easily seduced" I don't know what it is... besides completely willful ignorance. They did not want to pay attention to the actual choices they had, or look into the differences in the actual issues, simply because the grassroots candidates did not have material that arrived in the voters' mailboxes with flashy colors and almost insultingly simplistic promises and goals.
These voters were NOT informed, nor did they want to be. Most could not tell me hardly anything about what they were actually voting for or why. I honestly believe that 10 year olds have the exact same grasp on issues as many of these people, people who paid attention to nothing but the base fact that there was an election, and a few superficial ads that came in their mailboxes. So even if this *was* about lowering the voting age, I don't think it would make that much of a difference. There is already a massive problem with voters not being authentic or informed.