Youth vote
Democracy North Carolina published today the results of a survey on youth voting. The survey asked 18-24 year olds a variety of questions about registering to vote.
I'm struck by this finding:
"More than 1 out of 3 respondents, 34%, agreed that the process of registering to vote is inconvenient."
Really? I have to wonder about this finding based solely on my own experience.
It might have taken me all of five minutes to fill out my voter registration form the last time I changed address, and two of those minutes spent trying to find my new zip code. By contrast, when I moved to North Carolina I stood in line for more than four hours to get a driver's license that apparently isn't all that secure anyway.
In my pantheon of cumbersome, bureaucratic government processes registering to vote really never ranked. (Try getting a database out of a city that uses 40-year-old technology to store its data.)
So am I off base here?
Comments (3)
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Mark,
Lots of 18-24 year-olds find it inconvenient to get up in the morning. Many also don't know whom to vote for unless they see something about the candidates on "The Daily Show."
Posted on July 21, 2005 5:50 PM
Mark, you are not off base by any means. To make the process simpler, the Board of Elections would almost have to provide curbside service or home visits to get people registered.
Posted on July 21, 2005 8:37 PM
As a young person, you are right that may be excuse for not registering. However, I resent the comment about waking up early. You would truly be surprised how many young adults wake up maybe earlier than you, to go to work, school and do everything else that we do.
Back to the comment at hand, it is easy and it was an excuse. However, things that we want to, we will do, no matter how hard they may appear. The real issue is, we (speaking very generally and not including myself) see no real effect of our votes and feel like the vote does not matter.
We (my young adult blog community, Our World, Our View, www.ourworldourview.com) recently had a conversation about City Election on my blog, called "Ha! City Elections, Who Cares?? This can be found at http://calvinwilliamsjr.com/blog/?p=155.
Posted on July 22, 2005 10:49 AM