Stop Being Invisible

If you could have any superpower, what would it be? 

When we ask this as an icebreaker, somebody always chooses invisibility. Presumably, if you were invisible, you could gain access to a place from which you would otherwise be excluded, a place where something important is happening. 

Who came up with the idea that hiding is a great way to gain power? We can come up with a better superpower than that. What about the power to enter any space and participate fully, just as you are? What about the power to change a space into one that feels welcoming? Achieving this kind of power starts with becoming visible to ourselves and to one another. It involves confidence. It fosters belonging. It is an outcome of organizing. 

In politics, invisibility is not a superpower. When you are politically invisible, your concerns can be ignored when decision-makers create rules that govern your life. For young people in the U.S., invisibility means higher education can be financed with mountains of individual debt and public education budgets can be cut when times are tough. Invisibility can mean food insecurity, lack of adequate health care, regressive tax laws that exacerbate extreme wealth disparities, and lack of planning to avoid devastating impacts of climate change.

A research post by Simon Jackman and Bradley Spahn published in June of this year explained that political invisibility begins to break down when more people are registered to vote. One key reason is that political candidates and those considering running for office rely on voter files when calculating whether and how they can win. If you’re not in the voter file, you are invisible. If you are in the voter file, candidates can see you and can try to win your vote by paying attention to the issues you care about.

Candidates and political analysts often dismiss the potential impact of youth voters with a quip that young people don’t turn out to vote. According to US Census data, however, 86% of young people ages 18-24 who were registered to vote turned out to vote in November 2020. Low youth turnout is driven not by lack of interest, but by obstacles to voter registration. Increasing youth voter registration to the same level as registration rates for older voters would likely result in more than 4 million additional votes cast in presidential elections. Most people are shocked by these numbers, which go largely unreported. That is part of the invisibility problem.  

At The Civics Center, we are solving the invisibility problem through education, ideas, and calls to action. One of our programs is High School Voter Registration Week, which will take place this week from September 27-October 1. Now in its third year, students across the country use this national week of action as a time to hold voter registration drives in their high schools, encouraging one another to register to vote.

Students also need more than spirit to be effective in building youth political power and organizing effective voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts. Among other things, they need relevant, local, age-specific data. We’re giving them this as well, through our Future Voter Scorecards. 

Today, we are releasing Future Voter Scorecards for school districts in Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the U.S., with more than 10 million people and more than 50 school districts with high schools. The Scorecards for school districts in LA County are below, and the scores are not good.

Nationally, 74% of citizens age 25 and above are registered to vote. In California, 71% of citizens age 25 and above are registered to vote. In the overwhelming majority of school districts in LA County, however, fewer than half of the young people who turned 18 in the six months following the November 2020 election are registered to vote. 

Low registration rates for these new 18-year-olds persist, despite the fact that since 2014, California has allowed preregistration beginning at age 16 and has numerous laws in place encouraging or requiring high schools to help students register to vote. As we explained in our report from March 2021, the reason these low rates persist is that most schools are not complying with State laws that require them to help their students register.  

Our Scorecards provide a snapshot reflecting the end of the 2020-2021 school year. School districts faced enormous challenges during that year, and we can grant that during a pandemic, the responsibility to help young people register who were too young to vote in November 2020 may not have been the highest priority. Still, ignoring voter registration is not without consequences. Many people who graduated in May and June of 2021 are no longer in an educational setting. Many missed voting in the gubernatorial recall election, and they will be difficult to find and to register in time for the important local, state, and federal elections that will occur in 2022. 

Four million young people turn 18 every year in the US. If schools don’t do more, millions of young people will be disenfranchised in midterm elections in 2022.

These low rates are not inevitable. When students and educators pay attention, they can raise these rates dramatically. For example, Culver City and Redondo Beach both have effective in-school programming that encourages students to register to vote. The result is that they rank very high in the Scorecards. 

There are many ways for school districts to improve their rank.  Students can hold voter registration drives. Educators can advise them and provide meaningful nonpartisan education about voting and registering. School boards can enact policies to support voting and voter registration, rather than assuming, wrongly, that it will just happen without any education. Parents and community members can urge schools and school boards to do better. 

The Scorecards provide a baseline from which to measure their progress and a prompt to help them along.

2021 Future Voter Scorecard Los Angeles County, California (as of July 21, 2021)

Our results are based on US Census data (the ACS 5-year survey), and the official voter file of Los Angeles County as of July 21, 2021. We used the same methodology, as we did in a study we published earlier this month with Scorecards for Orange County, and our results for the school districts in Los Angeles County are subject to the same qualifications we stated in that report. Results shown for LA County are somewhat higher on average than those for Orange County, likely reflecting the fact that this report used the July 21, 2021 voter file, whereas the Orange County analysis uses a voter file from May 20, 2021. Registrations likely increased over the summer in part because of the gubernatorial recall election.