Applause to young voters

Sometimes it’s as basic as postage stamps.

The civics books and surveys commissioned to study America’s deplorable voting habits; the woe-is-me reports detailing citizen apathy among young people; even the well-meaning exhortations by columnists such as yours truly all tend to overlook such things as postage stamps.

Kids today don’t do postage stamps. Virtually every communicative act they undertake is electronic, on the telephone or computer or some nifty hand-held device. Paperless, one-step transmissions.

Filing an absentee ballot, though, requires a stamp. Requesting an absentee ballot requires a stamp. That means if you’re 18 years old and living on a college campus somewhere, or in the military, or otherwise away from home, the act of voting demands a stamp and an envelope.

This, college students say, is why they don’t bother to vote. It’s one of the reasons, anyway.

A lame excuse? Perhaps. Young people are far more likely than older Americans to offer justifications for shirking their civic duty on Election Day, a fact that has actually been documented by the research organization Public Agenda.

Voting is one of the last tactile communal acts left in America, and anything that lessens its real-life touch depresses turnout, especially among those who have not developed the habit of closing the curtain and exercising a precious franchise once or twice a year.

You’d think making voting easier would make it more attractive, but you’d be wrong. Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, examined states that have adopted early voting-by-mail systems and have liberalized their absentee ballot procedures. Here’s what he found: Those reforms don’t increase participation.

“They hurt turnout,” he says. In election after election, states with more liberal voting procedures perform worse than other states. The intensity and focus of voter-mobilization efforts are diffused. Voting becomes an act not unlike putting a bill in the mail hardly a heart-thumping experience, and surely not the enduring civic ritual that exerts a psychic pull (for some of us, at least) year after year.

There’s no galvanizing national issue for young people, no Civil Rights Movement, no Vietnam, no military draft of the sort that, 30 years ago, forced the voting age to include 18-year-olds. (Then the argument was if you were old enough to fight, you were old enough to vote. Shall we bring back the draft to re-establish that equation?)

And there is something more insidious: A political campaign process awash in money that benefits certain interests and certain states, and leaves everyone else with sound bites, negative TV ads and the dregs of discourse.

Studies done by Harvard’s Vanishing Voter project show that while older people bemoan the state of modern-day campaigning, they’re more likely to hold their noses and vote anyway. Young people, with no history of voting and no allegiance to the process, just stay home.

The cynic would say that’s exactly what victory-hungry politicians want: Since young people are more independent and less ideologically predictable, why encourage them to vote? If they can’t even find a 37-cent stamp, why should they help shape the future?

Because they “are” the future. While the demographers and marketers who steer contemporary campaigns argue that their clients should focus on more predictable voters, they’re missing the chance to woo a whole new electorate, an untapped market, the China of the political world.

To those who will break the cycle on today and vote for the first time: You go! But as a real gift to the majority of young Americans who likely will stay at home, let’s seriously begin to reform a political process that distances itself from the very people who hold our future in their hands.


Jane R. Eisner is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is jeisner@phillynews.com.