American voters ages 18 to 24 are becoming the Montreal baseball fans of the democratic world on Election Day — game day — they just don’t attend.
During the Democratic primaries, Howard Dean offered new approaches for wooing young voters. After record-low participation in the California primary, legislatures on the left coast are discussing a “Training Wheels for Citizenship” proposal. The bill would fractionally enfranchise teenagers as young as 14 years old.
Still we need to take other measures to reach this demographic before boys and girls become men and women in the eyes of the law. Call it a preemptive strike.
For an intriguing solution, we can look to an unlikely source: Cuba. Yes Cuba, the alleged not-so-shining example of undemocratic behavior.
In fall 2002 my friends and I were among the first Americans invited to witness Cubans vote for the National Assembly of People’s Power. The assembly is the island’s equivalent of the U.S. Senate.
While ballots featured only members of the Cuban Communist Party — and El Maximo wasn’t subjected to polling — I was inspired by something there. Cuban school children were guarding the ballot boxes, taking part in the process, learning experientially.
Of 18- to 24-year-old Americans surveyed by the New Millennium Young Voters Project, 55 percent said schools don’t do a very good job of giving young people the information and basic skills they need to vote.
Q.T. Carter, principal of Oakton Elementary School in Evanston, said teachers at Oakton encourage students to go to the polls on Election Day, but few pupils heed the advice.
“Elementary students are naive regarding the polling process and the importance of elections,” he said.
Jack Doppelt, a Medill professor and co-author of “Nonvoters: America’s No-Shows,” said most minors only encounter democracy through class elections, an uninspiring, if not humiliating experience.
Students across the country participate in contests like Indiana’s Stock Market Challenge, which gives four-member teams $500,000 of virtual trading cash to buy, sell or trade mock shares. The mission: ensuring that every child in America has a fundamental understanding of the free-enterprise system. Are class elections the best we can do for ensuring every child in America has a fundamental understanding of the democratic system?
In 1996 the 18- to 24-year-old population in the United States numbered 24,650,000, according to the Federal Election Commission. That year only 32 percent voted for president. In 1998, the last federal-election year for which the FEC has data, 19 percent voted.
Through linking elementary schools and neighborhood voting outlets, and allowing students to personally contribute to the election process we may be able to apply a remedy before the democracy-crippling disease arises. We can plant seeds of interest and incubate a sense of duty. Placing children at the polling stations might even motivate no-show parents to show.
In 2000 the Florida voting debacle — remember the hanging chads — prompted Fidel Castro to condescendingly offer the United States assistance in conducting future elections. The United States does not need the help of the bearded one in that department, but we could stand to learn a few things from his country’s quasi-democratic example.
