At this week's Round Table, Kenisha and Madeline spoke with Laura Brill, Founder and Executive Director of The Civics Center, founded in the shadow of the 2016 election to push back again the stereotype of teens being apathetic. The Civic Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving high school voter registration and civic engagement. This mission is incredibly important, given the 4 million Americans who turn 18 each year, and the 35 states that allow for registration before that birthday. While the vast majority of high school students are eligible to register before they turn 18, just 6% of them are ever asked or encouraged at school to do so. 6%! The impact of the youth vote IF REGISTERED AND ACTIVATED can dwarf electoral margins. The Civics Center has a plan to reach this enormous, unmet potential; the youth leaders they have trained have mobilized tens of thousands of their peers to register and vote—and they aim to train and mobilize thousands more.
Being registered changes the whole political landscape—the reality is you don’t count if you’re not in the voter file and you’re not taken seriously if you’re not registered or pre registered. The other reality is it shouldn’t be this hard to register! We talked about how dispiriting it is that there are so few civics clubs and effective voter registration efforts at schools. The Civic Center is coming out with materials about using high graduation as a crystallizing experience to register voters as a counterpoint to fall student voter registration drives.
We talked frankly and fully about the range of barriers to registration—beyond accessibility and opportunity are the narratives that discourage young people from taking ADVANTAGE of the opportunity to register and vote. We also discussed perceptions of young people, young people’s attitudes towards civics, how they are changing, and how to make progress as a generation despite being handed so many challenges.
The history of our country is that of small groups of people using the tools we have to make enormous changes to expand democracy. We haven’t yet lost the capacity to do that and we are committed to working together—and with you—to advance this vision. Thank you for listening!
