Why Don't Students Vote?
Design: Molly Bokor
I was walking out of class one day, prepped to tune in to my podcast and tune out the world, when a young woman approached me. She couldn’t have been much older than I am. “Take a newspaper,” she implored. Suppressing my elitist notion of what qualifies as a “newspaper” — of which a flimsy piece of printer paper folded in half does not — I obliged. This is when I’d usually carry it away, offer a scant glance and move on with my life. The faux-newspaper would find the trash. It’s hard to say why, compelled by some uncharacteristic force, I asked her what was in the paper instead. “We’re organizing a boycott of the election,” she said, blissfully unaware that she’d barked up the wrong tree if she thought I was the right audience. But I was curious. Here was this 20-something-year-old who had a moral conviction to not partake in the most fundamental democratic process. She wasn’t ambivalent. She wasn’t lazy. She was cynical, but not in a detached way. She was politically active. And she desperately wanted her peers to not vote.
In 2016, 44.7 percent of University of Michigan students voted. Nationally, 55.7 percent of eligible voters cast their ballot. In the state of Michigan, only 37 percent of eligible voters between the ages of 18-24 voted — below the national average and a dip of nearly four percent from 2012. The 18-24-year-old demographic consistently has the lowest voter turnout and voter registration of any demographic in the country. These are facts that inevitably lead to a generic autopsy. People ask broad questions that lead to broad generalizations, which can even end up being self-fulfilling. Kids these days are lazy. They don’t care about anything. They complain but don’t exercise their voice.