Registering High School Voters

Two weeks ago, Friday night’s guest for “Five Questions with" was Laura Brill and her mission to make voter registration accessible at high schools across the country. The conversation was so timely and so important that I’ve taken it out from behind the paywall so that everyone has access to this information as millions of high school students return to school.

Laura updated me with her most recent information today. She said that the most recent reports show that less than 40% of 18-year-olds are registered to vote in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Arizona. In New Hampshire, the registration rate for 18-year-olds is just 21%.

Read on to learn about The Civics Center, founded by Laura as a national nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to making voter registration part of every high school in America. Here’s the most important part: from September 23-27th, the Civics Center is organizing High School Voter Registration Week around the country. If you’re looking for something you can do to make a difference in this election, keep reading. There is room for all of us to get involved:

• The Civics Center is offering a $150 gift card for students who go through their education and organizing program and get their schools ready to vote during High School Voter Registration Week.

• They have scheduled four Zoom calls for a behind-the-scenes update in September and October for those who are interested in learning more about the Center’s work. 

Laura is an attorney and a former law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She launched The Civics Center in 2018 and explains, “We create resources for students to lead drives, we host workshops around the country to help train students and educators do voter registration, and we calculate high-quality data around 18-year-old registration rates in states around the country, including Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Ohio, and Arizona, the most recent ones we've looked at.” My original conversation with Laura is repeated below.

Joyce: Tell us what drew you to the challenge of youth voter turnout, how you arrived at the idea of creating High School Voter Registration Week, and how it’s going to work.

Laura: The motivation for starting The Civics Center goes back to the 2016 election. My kids were teenagers at the time. I got curious about why more young people hadn't turned out. I picked up the California Election Code and learned for the first time about the possibility for young people to preregister to vote at age 16. Even though I had done a lot of election-related litigation, I had no idea this law existed. I started asking lawyers, teachers, students, and parents. Virtually no one knew about the law. 

At the same time, I was becoming extremely concerned about challenges to our democracy, including challenges to the independence and integrity of the federal judiciary, the embrace by some of racism in public life, efforts to undermine the integrity of elections, misinformation, and an overall lack of civics education and understanding and outreach to youth. 

Justice Ginsburg wrote the dissent in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Her dissent was warning us to take seriously the Supreme Court majority’s refusal to support voting rights.  Since then, of course, the Supreme Court has drifted even further away from enforcing core protections for voting and democracy. Lawyers, parents, and really everyone should be looking at where the power lies today in protecting democracy. If the courts are not reliable in protecting the right to vote, then a key to protecting democracy lies with organizing, registering, and voting. 

In 2017, I started talking with other democracy organizations about preregistration. My hope was that an existing organization would take on high school voter registration as a key goal. Eventually, a friend said to me: Laura, no one is going to be able to do this in a comprehensive way. You just have to start something and then others will partner with you. So, that’s what I did. 

High School Voter Registration Week (and our spring campaign, Cap, Gown & Ballot) came out of our goal to make voter registration a tradition in high schools that students can make their own, twice per year. We realized we needed a week that was far enough into the school year that students would have enough time to plan and launch a drive and that was in advance of voter registration deadlines. In the spring, we take advantage of graduation season as a rite of passage with its own events and deadlines. Voter registration can be like any other school activity, like student newspaper, clubs, and sports. Schools and school districts can challenge one another. We’d love to see a race to the top.

And it’s going great. We have already trained and provided resources to hundreds of students and educators just this summer, more than any year since we started. Students who go through our training and organizing program receive a toolkit – Democracy in a Box – with swag for their drive, and they can receive a $150 gift card for getting their school ready to vote. We’ve created downloadable state-by-state guides for educators, so they can know the nuts and bolts of how to support the work in their schools.

Joyce: I’m a big fan of using data to support the work we do across the board when it comes to democratic institutions, and it’s critical when it comes to voting. What does the data say here about youth voter turnout, how to support it, and the impact it can have?

Laura: It’s very clear across the board that young Americans, specifically 18-year-olds, are registered to vote at significantly lower rates than older Americans. As of the 2022 midterms, only 30% of 18-year-olds nationwide were registered to vote. Today, our research shows that, in Arizona, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, under 35% of 18-year-olds are registered to vote. 

We need to turn around the misperception that young people who register to vote are unlikely to turn out. That’s just not true. When they know the stakes and that their votes can matter, registered youth turn out at high rates. In 2020, 86% of registered youth (18-24) turned out. In every presidential election going back to 2004, more than 75% of registered youth voted. Once they are registered, candidates and campaigns know where to find them, and once they know how to register and why their votes matter, they are motivated to turn out.  

The data also tell us that high school efforts are critical. Forty percent of high school graduates do not go on to college. Forty percent of 18-year-olds do not have a driver’s license. So while college programs and motor voter are critically important, they still miss a huge portion of the population. But almost everyone goes to high school. It’s the most efficient and equitable place to get young people registered.

Today, 19 states and the District of Columbia allow young people to preregister to vote starting at age 16. These states account for more than 50% of teens in the US. Even in the most age-restrictive states, virtually everyone is old enough to register when they are still in high school. The US Department of Education recently published guidance specifically calling on high schools to incorporate nonpartisan voter registration into their programs. 

The data also reveal enormous disparities within and between states, among different school districts or counties in a single state, and between different age groups. These gaps often correlate to racial differences in the composition of the relevant area. In New York, for example, under 25% of 18-year-olds are registered in Brooklyn and the Bronx, whereas some wealthier, more homogenous, heavily White counties have rates exceeding 70%.  As to age differences, even in states with high youth registration numbers, and Michigan has become a great example, there’s still nearly a 20-point gap between 18-year-olds and those 45+. In New York, there’s a 30 percentage point difference. In Ohio and Arizona, it’s more than 40 points. The policy landscape can make an enormous difference.  

Joyce: What keeps young people from voting? Are there steps our state legislatures or Congress can and should be taking? Other politicians and community leaders?

Laura: There are many factors that keep young people from voting. One significant hurdle is how hard it can be for young Americans to register to vote. Whether it’s states that still don’t offer accessible online registration, or states that make it nearly impossible to host registration drives, or that have strict ID laws or early registration deadlines, we aren’t making it easy for young Americans to participate. 

Lack of quality civics education, including voter registration programs, and outreach by candidates and campaigns are other important factors. Pew reported in 2017 that only 6-7% of students were asked to register in school or as part of a class. Surveys of youth routinely report lack of contact by candidates. There’s also a vicious cycle. If young people aren’t registered, candidates and campaigns—especially at the state and local level who don’t have huge budgets—often do not believe they have the resources to conduct outreach to those who are not registered.  

State laws can make a big difference. In addition to allowing preregistration at age 16, examples of positive legislative changes include same-day registration, secure automatic voter registration, online registration, and curricular requirements to include nonpartisan instruction in how and why to register to vote. Legislation on its own, without energetic implementation, typically does not do the job. California and New York both have positive permissive laws to allow young people to register, but neither state has effective implementation. As of August 2024, only 20% of 16- and 17-year-olds are preregistered in New York State, and as of July, under 15% were preregistered in California. 

Students, educators, and parents can all play a critical role in creating the social climate in which registration is a routine rite of passage, rather than something selected only by a few. It is a wonderful leadership opportunity for students to help their peers register and vote. It works, because they listen to their peers, their friends and trusted adults in ways they don’t listen to politicians or political parties. 

Politicians and community leaders can definitely encourage registrations and drives, reminding young Americans whenever they can to register to vote. Many 18-year-olds don’t even know you need to register to vote, and anything we can do to educate and remind them gets the ball rolling. And of course, if they can promote high school voter registration drives, and get schools in their community to participate in High School Voter Registration Week, even better.  

Joyce: What makes a voter registration drive successful? What kind of outcome are you looking for this September?

Laura: A successful high school voter registration drive is one that is energetic, educational, and includes everyone. The most successful drives include student leadership and educator support. Students collaborate with adults and peers to organize and promote their voter registration drive. They activate their peers by connecting voting to the issues that they care about, and they register their friends and classmates. Educators build administrative support, incorporate civic education into classroom curriculum, and connect students with training opportunities. Voter registration can be like student newspapers, clubs, and sports, an ongoing opportunity that is embedded in the lifeblood of a school.

We’ve found that educators often have not received training in how to make a drive successful. This summer, we have just released state-by-state guidance that educators can download for free. 

There isn’t a single metric that we use to measure success, each state’s rules are so different, and each school is so different. The important thing is to get started. As in any meaningful effort, skills will build over time. 

But what we know does help, and what does work, is when it’s a wide swath of students helping lead it. A drive led by one student is better than no drive at all, but the drives that seem to return large numbers of registrations are the ones I jokingly call a Breakfast Club drive, where students from a variety of cliques and friend groups join together to get a drive going. 

In larger schools, and in places with pre-registration, we frequently see drives with 200+ students registered. Some are just a dozen or a few dozen registrations, which still moves the ball forward.

This September we’re hoping to spark and support drives in 500 schools. 

Joyce: What can we do to help?

Laura: You can get involved in a variety of ways. 

The first thing is to get all the high school students and educators you know to attend a training session. We have a whole section on our site to help teachers and educators set their students up for success to run voter registration drives, and links to online training events. And students can earn a gift card when they complete our program and get their school ready to vote.

Parents and grandparents can make a big impact when they encourage their students to register and contact school officials to encourage them to participate by showing them our site and giving them a nudge to get involved.

If you’re not a parent, grandparent, or educator, please forward this interview along to friends and family who might be. Word of mouth is one of the best ways to get young Americans involved in democracy, and you can play a part.

Also, we all can keep nudging our elected officials to make voter registration easier and make resources more accessible to schools and educators. We have a petition going, calling on Congress to pass the Youth Voting Rights Act, which would remove a lot of the legislative hurdles that states have imposed.

Of course, we welcome donations to support this work. And lastly, remember to vote. Set a good example for the young Americans in your life, and make voting seem as standard as watching the Superbowl or celebrating Thanksgiving!

---

Encouraging younger voters to register and turn out is the assignment! Now we’ve got one more way to help!

We’re in this together,

Joyce