NYC's youth voter drive added nearly 30K students to election rolls
/
Students at William Cullen Bryant High School in Woodside signed up to vote during the city’s annual Civics Week. Photo courtesy via the Mayor’s Office/Twitter
By David Brand
Nearly 30,000 New York City high school and college students added their names to the voter rolls during the city’s annual registration drive in March, the city said Friday.
A total of 29,642 young people citywide registered to vote during the city’s 2020 Civics Week initiative, up from 18,233 last year. Lawmakers, city officials, community leaders and a cavalcade of volunteers canvassed roughly 1,000 classrooms across the city to ensure young people signed up to vote in the June primaries and November state and presidential election.
The initiative “set a new benchmark for how local government can ensure future generations of New Yorkers are active and engaged voters,” said Omar Khan, the director of the Mayor’s Public Engagement Unit.
The program also pre-registered 16- and 17-year-olds who will become eligible to vote when they turn 18.
"The Civics Week Student Voter Registration Drive was a great opportunity to empower youth through pre-registering and registering high school students to vote," said Laura Wood, senior advisor and general counsel for DemocracyNYC, which co-led the voter drive with the Mayor's Public Engagement Unit and the Department of Education.
The achievement was the result of “tremendous city-wide coordination and outreach effort,” Wood added.
Young people vote at a far lower rate than older adults, often because they have not yet registered to cast a ballot. Analysis suggests that young people who are registered to vote show up at a similar rate as older voters, however.
Roughly 46 percent of newly registered voters between ages 18 and 29 turned out to vote during the 2018 general election, on par with new voters in other age groups, according to a report by the New York City Campaign Finance Board. During the 2016 Presidential Election, 63.3 percent of newly registered voters between ages 18 and 29 showed up at the polls.
“Young New Yorkers have exercised their political power on global issues like climate change and gun violence, and the results from Civics Week show that young voters will be a force in the 2020 elections as well,” said Campaign Finance Board NYC Votes Outreach Director Sabrina Castillo.
Castillo said NYC Votes — a nonpartisan voter engagement initiative from the Campaign Finance Board — is now advocating for online registration to improve access during the state’s stay-at-home order.
“We join with youth leaders across the city who are pushing for a fully accessible online voter registration system,” she said. “With in-person voter registration closed off due to the coronavirus pandemic, online voter registration is essential to keeping our democracy open to all new voters."
