Voter Registration During a Pandemic: West Valley City, Utah [Voices of Democracy series]
With roughly 3,000 students, it’s hard to imagine walking through the halls of my school with it feeling so empty. The impacts of COVID-19 on high schools across the country have been different to varying degrees, with some schools doing full distance learning, while others have everyone attend in-person. My school, Granger High School, has certain protocols along with the other high schools in the state. We’re doing “hybrid learning” where it’s an option to be in-person or online. With the added protocol that if a certain amount of students get COVID the school needs to be dismissed for two weeks, you can imagine that planning a voter registration drive would be a little difficult.
Up until the end of the last school year, voter registration was not much of a tradition at Granger. West Valley City is one of the few majority-minority cities in Utah. Roughly 70% of the students here are on free or reduced lunch, and it’s one of the most diverse public high schools in the state. With this in mind, and a very big election coming up, attending such a diverse school with no strong presence of voter registration became a point of questioning for some students. With not much experience under my belt, I decided that this needed to change. It felt like a necessity to host a registration drive through one of the various cultural clubs at school. Black Student Union was one of those clubs and it had just been started that year. With the help of teachers and our advisors, we were able to host a successful drive. At the time though, this seemed to just be foreshadowing a more successful drive that would take place in the spring. As COVID-19 became a more pressing concern and schools nationwide started to close, it’s difficult to not think about all the drives that would have taken place, and more specifically, what could have happened here at Granger.
Getting the opportunity to work with The Civics Center this summer was a source of motivation. From learning how to incorporate my own life story into a call-to-action, and getting to teach other students how to host digital drives during Future Voters Action Week sessions, my motivation kept growing. Watching the pandemic grow worse over the summer and early fall was still frightening though, but it’s a harsh reality many students my age had to come to terms with. Knowing I would be going into the new school year with help from my Black Student Union advisor, Mr. G, and the government teachers at my school, kept me going. For this fall, we decided to do things differently. We advertised our drive throughout the week, at the same time that another club at our school also wanted to host a drive too! Printing out paper forms, assigning a schedule, emailing teachers, and all sorts of things going into the planning process were all ready. The election was getting closer and closer and so was my state’s voter registration deadline. In a year as chaotic as 2020 however, some things can’t ever go as planned. By this point, many students have had to face the harsh reality of expecting the unexpected, with me being one of them.
During the week of our drive, I ended up coming down with COVID. Cases nationwide were spiking for what seemed like the millionth time this year. Our voter registration drive pulled through, and we got a lot of seniors registered to vote. Although I couldn't be there, seeing what the other club members were getting done, and keeping up with the vast amount of other drives taking place across the country on social media filled me with a sense of pride.
When you look at this year completely from an outsider's perspective, thinking about what students nationwide accomplished and what they're still ready to do is amazing. To be a part of this year’s youth voter registration efforts in any way I could be was, in many ways, the highlight of my year.
Ameena Ahmed is a 2020 Youth Fellow with The Civics Center and is a junior at Granger High School in West Valley City, Utah. The Civics Center’s “Voices of Democracy” blog series celebrates and highlights the voices that matter to us most: those of young people working to improve civic engagement and participation in our democracy.