How is When We All Vote Combatting the Age and Race Gap?
By Stephanie Tran
Although voting is the key we need to unlock the doors of a democratic society, it is unequally shared among the hands of many in America. There is a race and age voting gap in America that the When We All Vote organization has sought to improve.
RACE GAP
With amendments such as the Fifteenth and Nineteenth, the right to vote has been legally expanded to include people of color and women. However, there remains a race gap in voting which can be seen in the race gap in a model of the 2014 midterm election turnout in which “54 percent of whites reported voting, compared with 49 percent of African Americans—a gap not much different from the figures of the 1980s and 1990s. Latino and Asian turnout was even lower: Among voting-age citizens, only 33 percent of Latinos and 35 percent of Asian Americans voted. The 20-point gap between them and whites is the largest on record.”(Fraga) Over half of the 2014 midterm election was powered by a collective group of white Americans while less than half were powered by a combined group of African Americans, Asians, and Latinx which means to say that our votes still fail to resemble the power of America’s melting pot. We have seemed to give off this idea that minorities are not important in the decision process of who wins and who loses, so “they are less likely to be targeted for get-out-the-vote campaigns, which further depresses minority voting.”(Fraga) However, what is America if the opinions of the minority don’t balance out with the opinions of the majority?
AGE GAP
The 26th Amendment, guaranteed young people the right to vote when they turned 18. Over the last few decades, conducted studies have shown that “voter turnout is lowest among young adults, increases rapidly up to ages thirty-five to forty-five, and then continues to increase (more slowly), declining only slightly after the age of seventy or eighty in the United States”(Political Behavior Voting Behavior) The chart on the left shows the distinctions made between the voter turnout of the 2014 and 2018 elections, in which the 2014 election had the lowest voter turnout in seventy years and the 2018 election had the highest voter turnout since 1914. As one may see, eligible voters between the ages of 18-29 provide up to 35.6% of the voter turnout, voters between the ages of 30-44 contribute up to 48.8%, and voters of ages 45 and up contribute for more than half of the voter turnout. With this being said, it is noticeable that young voters, like us, are not as dedicated to the political matters of our country as older people are as our voting rate is much less than theirs, which implies that most of this country’s decisions are based on the minds and opinions of the older than the younger.
HOW WHEN WE ALL VOTE STEPS IN
This is where the national campaign When We All Vote is working to close these historic gaps in voting. Their mission as an organization is to “change the culture around voting and help increase voter participation in every election by closing the race and age gap.” They claim that “it’s [their] responsibility to help all voters exercise their right to vote, and to give them the best information on exactly how to do that.” For the 2018 midterm elections, the organization created 2,500 local voter registration events nation-wide, educated 200 million Americans on the importance and effects of voting, and even texted resources and reminders to register/vote to about four million voters. These numbers aren’t just for statistical reasons, they signify a change. Millions of Americans were enlightened and educated about voting because of When We All Vote, and it is without a doubt that the national organization will continue to strive to influence all qualified voters, regardless of the color of their skin and their literal age, to speak up and direct the nation into a course that is preferable and just for everyone.
Stephanie Tran is a senior at Hoover High School. Aside from being a member of When We All Vote, she is also the president of her school’s Key Club and Chamber Orchestra, an editor for her school’s Social Justice Academy and the First Gen Scholars club, and a proud student leader overall who loves to expand her social bubble and interact with others!
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