During the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, who lost the youth vote to her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, extended a hand toward that demographic.
“I don’t know who created Pokemon Go,” the former secretary of state said with a large smile at a July campaign rally in Virginia, “but I’m trying to figure out how we get them to Pokemon Go to the polls.”
The line was widely mocked. And yet the crux of what Clinton was saying has long eluded politicians: how to inspire young voters to get to the polls?
In 2018, voter turnout among those 18-29 years old reached 36 percent in the midterm elections, 79 percent higher than it was in 2014. But it still trailed nationwide average turnout among all voters, which hit a midterm record of 53.4 percent.
A group of recent college graduates are working to shrink the voter turnout gap between Generation Z and baby boomers. They posit that young people need to be convinced their individual vote has power. Together, they launched Voteology, a website that algorithmically determines whether your vote will have more impact at your home address or your college campus address.
It is an effort to underscore how a single vote can matter.
Voteology’s algorithm looks at the margin of the last presidential election in a person’s home state and that of their college, the last House race in both those districts, and if there is a Senate seat or governorship up for grabs that will be more easily swayed. With this information, and a handful of other factors, the site recommends where the user should register. Then, it leads users through the registration process in the state that vote will create the bigger impact.
The site aims to reach 500,000 college students this fall, said Juliana Bain, who began the project as a note in her iPhone after the 2016 election when she realized many young people she knew didn’t vote.
Voteology is far from the first youth voter initiative. Back in 1990, Rock the Vote, associated at the time with the MTV music channel, announced it would appeal to the elusive youngest voters. Since then, Rock the Vote has registered some 12 million people, and recruited actors and musicians to convey the message that voting is cool, nonpartisan and broadly important.
Newer groups are trying a more tactical approach.
Voteology, which is also nonpartisan, is targeting students in six battleground states — Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona — all states where margins could be tight enough in 2020 for college students to help swing the results.
Bain, 22, who graduated from Cornell University this spring with a degree in math and computer science, said she wants Voteology to welcome her generation into the political process, while “drawing attention to the disparities gerrymandering and the electoral college have created in the empirical value of votes.”
“If young people had higher turnout, we could be the largest voting bloc in the U.S., and the policy changes we want to see could be more recognized on a national scale,” Noe Abernathy, 22, who runs the group’s operations, said.
This isn’t hyperbole. More than 15 million Americans have turned 18 since the 2016 presidential election. And Americans ages 18 to 32 make up the largest voting population group, according to analysis by the Tufts University Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which focuses on the political life of young people in the U.S.
Where they vote matters. Abernathy grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, which as she puts it “goes blue in every single race.” When she got to Cornell in the beginning of 2016, she didn’t even know she could re-register in New York. But her new home, Ithaca, was represented in Congress by a Republican and she could vote against him.
Every election, people talk about how to get the youth to vote, Abby Kiesa, the director of impact at the Tufts center, said, but they rarely acknowledge the hurdles young people face to get to the polls.
Those challenges, Kiesa said, include the basic one of outreach: voting organizations are more likely to contact people who are already registered or have voted before than first-time voters. Young voters also face a huge education gap in understanding why voting matters. And in the 39 states the center surveyed in June, registration among 18 to 24 year olds was higher than 2016 levels in 20 states, but among first-time presidential voters ages 18 to 19, registration was down in 30 of the 39 states compared to the last election. These gaps, Kiesa says, are not about youth interest: they actually demonstrate whether states have a robust electoral and civic infrastructure. With tabling and in-person outreach limited during the pandemic, young people could easily fall further through the cracks in 2020, she added.
This year, focusing on college campuses is hard. It is difficult to determine what happens if a student moves on campus, registers, and then has to go home because COVID-19 shuts down their campus. Plus, some states also have laws purposefully engineered to discourage out-of-states students to register to vote on campus.
But college campuses are far from the only place to find younger voters. “Almost 40 percent of 18-29 year olds don’t have any college experiences,” Keisa said. It’s these young people who are often even further ignored by the political system.
Still, Keisa has faith in youth, who she says "are filling the gaps themselves.”
Abernathy and the other women behind Voteology hope the site can help fill in those gaps, even if it can’t get all of them. They want to reach voters who might not even like who is on the ballot, but should participate anyway.
“Just because you don’t think Biden or Trump represent who you want to run our country, doesn’t mean you should sit out,” Abernathy said.
