Dear Class of 2024 (and ’25, ’26, and every class after that): Your Votes Are Being Suppressed. We don’t accept it, and neither should you
High school voter registration could dramatically improve low rates in just a few years, and we can make it happen, together.
Dear Class of 2024 (and ’25, ’26, and every class after that):
Graduation season has brought a memory back to me. When my son was in preschool, his class put on a show. They rehearsed for weeks. There was a song, and a dance, and they would all dress up like bees.
He learned the moves, the lyrics, and the tune. But as the day approached, he made one thing clear: he was not dressing like a bee.
He was four years old, and so his explanation required a bit of interpretation. But I’m convinced he found the whole thing demeaning.
He didn’t like the uniformity. He didn’t like the forced cuteness. Lord knows, he didn’t like the fabric. And he didn’t like being made into an object of display for other people’s parents and their tablet-sized recording devices.
He was human after all, and he had feelings and friendships, a four-year-old’s sense of style and design, which is to say, firmly held. He had a sense of who he was and how he wanted to be in the world. And none of it said, “bee.”
You can tell, I’m proud of his defiance. Just because he was a child, didn’t mean he lacked a sense of self; didn’t mean he should be overlooked.
In communities across the country, there will be silly hats, displays of uniformity, and seas of parental recording devices. The celebrations are for you, the four million high school seniors, graduating this year and the four million coming up next. Like my son in preschool, you shouldn’t be overlooked either.
But the problem is, today, you are being overlooked, massively. Or, in many places, worse than overlooked, you are being subjected to rules and practices calculated to take away your power by undermining your ability to have a voice in our democracy.
Virtually all of you in the Class of 2024, all four million, will be old enough to vote in November. In the Class of 2025, about 20% will be old enough to vote, as well. But your practical ability to vote is under attack. In state legislatures across the country, majorities have been hard at work, passing laws aimed at shutting you out. It’s an organized effort, and it’s targeting the most vulnerable, including you.
An alarming report issued a few months ago by The Brennan Center, VoteRiders, University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement (CDCE) and Public Wise described the potential impact on young people of the wave of strict voter ID laws. According to that report, millions of young people are at risk of being locked out of voting under these new laws.¹
And all too often, when it comes to you – the four million students graduating high school right now and for everyone coming up behind you – voter suppression is as much an act of omission as commission.
Over the past decades, student access to civic knowledge, skills, dispositions, and experiences has eroded. In most schools, non-partisan instruction in the most basic aspects of citizenship: the requirements and processes to register, and the increasingly complex requirements to be able to cast a ballot, are nowhere to be found.
Don’t be mad at your teachers. It’s not their fault. For the most part, the reason they are not doing it is that they have not received the resources or training to cover it. Your school boards, district superintendents, and state legislatures, for the most part, have not required them to do it, provided the resources to do it, or put in place the most basic systems to ensure that it gets done.
The gaps in our democracy are taking a toll on you, today’s graduates and tomorrow’s — our children, future voters, and future leaders.
Nationally, the persistent and extreme registration gap evidences a neglect that is hard to fathom.²
But a solution is so obvious. And you, the four million about to graduate, and the next four million who are right behind you, and the class after that, are at the center of it.
High school voter registration could fix this human-made administrative obstacle in just a few years. And so it’s fair to ask: Why isn’t it happening? Why do our campaigns throw tens of billions of dollars at paid ads and spend virtually nothing on high school voter registration and virtually nothing to make sure everyone who needs an ID knows it and has it? Why are our state legislatures putting laws in place to block your ability to see yourselves as full members of our democracy and to participate as such? And maybe, worst of all, why do they blame you?
I don’t have great answers for these questions, at least none that are appropriate for graduation season.
What I can say to you four million who are about to graduate, and to your roughly 8 million parents and 16 million grandparents, and to the millions more coming up next year, is this. You don’t need to sit by and let it happen.
Now. Today. Fill out a form, get a stamp, mail it in and register. You can find your state and print out a form here.
With online voter registration, if you already have a state ID or if your state (like Pennsylvania and New York) does not require one, you can take care of it right now, right here. No stamps required.
If you live in a state where you will need ID to vote, even after you get yourself registered, you can find out what you need from our friends at VoteRiders so you’ll be able to vote in November. If you don’t already have what you need, you still have time to get it. Every state is different, as you no doubt learned in social studies. Ask for the help you need.
Your school may never have held a voter registration drive. Your teachers may have no idea that half of high school teens live in states that allow preregistration at age 16 or that virtually everyone, regardless of state, is old enough to register while they are still in high school.
You may be the first to ask, why does our school have 8 sports teams, a juggling club, glee club, cooking, photography, and chess, (all of which are great and I hope your school does have them), but no one making sure you have what you need to register to vote? You may need to say, in a kind and pointed way:
We want to have a voice in democracy. We don’t want to be overlooked. It’s harder than it should be to register and vote. Help prepare us.
It may not feel comfortable at first. But it’s your power. If you don’t use it, who will?
And as you’re jumping through these hoops that you shouldn’t need to jump through, to participate in a democracy that should be taking joy in your participation and welcoming you with open arms, you’ll be increasing your own capacity and setting an example for others.
The distance may feel long and discouraging at times, but others before you fought hard for the right to vote. Those who tell you voting doesn’t matter are not serving you. Those who repeat endlessly that young people don’t care, don’t know what they are talking about and are not serving you, either. Voting matters. Young people care, and you can make a difference.
17 new voter ID laws have passed since 2020 alone.
Nearly 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens do not have a current (non-expired) driver’s license.
Young Americans are least likely to have a driver’s license with their current name and/or address. 41% of Americans 18-24 and 38% between the ages of 25-29 do not have such an ID, compared to 13% between the ages of 50-64.
Thirty-one percent of adult citizens aged 18-29 face potential voting difficulties due to not currently having an ID required in their state to vote.
Over half of Americans living in states requiring photo ID to vote in-person do not know their state’s laws, and do not realize that they will need this type of identification to successfully cast a ballot.
As of the 2022 midterms, only 30% of 18-year-olds nationally were registered to vote. Today, we are seeing similar or lower rates in some of the states with the greatest potential to influence the future of the country as a whole in 2024: Ohio, 32%; Arizona, 25%; Pennsylvania, 24%.
In all these states, registration deadlines will be closed in 5 months or less. That’s less than 20 weeks to register nearly 300,000 18-year-olds in these three states alone, to say nothing of the 170,000 17-year-olds in these three states who will be 18 by November, and to say nothing of all the other states that are, for the most part, equally behind.
In New Hampshire, the state puts up so many barriers, including complex proof-of-residency requirements and no other option than in-person registration, that only 9% of 18-year-olds were registered as of December 2023 – look for more details in our forthcoming report.