et’s see a show of hands: How many of you were eligible to vote in the last presidential election?
Okay, hands down.
Of those were able to vote, who actually did?
When’s the last time you voted for your Senate or House representative, your mayor or governor?
Hell, did you even vote in last week’s campus elections for Senate and Union?
I didn’t think so.
I’m reminded of a Veterans of Foreign Wars marquee I saw that read “If you don’t vote, you lose your bitching rights.”
Guilford has a reputation for being politically active. We have students who protest the war in Iraq, who are planning to attend the March for Women’s Lives next month and who bring peace activists to campus.
But how many of the 1,097 traditional-age students have actually exercised their right to vote? We certainly do enough bitching.
Whatever the answer is, it’s not good enough unless it’s all of us. And I know it wasn’t.
Often it’s people our age who prompt social change. It was the college students who sparked the French Revolution, who died during Japan’s Ampo protests, who were the leaders and “shock troops” of the Civil Rights movement.
It is often a country’s young intellectuals that instigate change because they are the blessed few citizens with both the education and the time on their hands to be concerned about the state of the world.
That’s us.
That’s why we complain about Bush and want to solve the Israeli/Palestine conflict. But there’s no way you can get your views represented in Washington, DC if you don’t vote.
A lot of the power of young intellectuals lies in the fact that we are often underestimated. Can you imagine what kind of political power we would have if people our age consistently voted? Approximately 20% of the country’s population is people our age – that’s 58.5 million potential votes.
No politician on the planet would scoff at 58 million votes.
Especially not when only 200 million people voted in the last presidential election.
Of course, this assumes that young people would all vote the same. It’s a surprising fact that half of young voters tend to be moderates, while the remaining half is split evenly between Democrats or Republicans. But even a boost of young Democrat voters would account for about seven percent of the total votes amassed. And if the young moderate voters decide they want Bush out of office, that’s 44 million votes extra for the other guy – nearly a quarter of all votes cast.
People are wising up to the voting power of the younger generation and doing lots to encourage good voting habits.
There’s a proposed amendment to the U.S. constitution that would give people as young as 14 partial votes in state elections.
Numerous programs exist to encourage young people to vote, including Rock the Vote, Hip-Hop Team Vote, WWE’s Smackdown Your Vote!, New Voters Project, Declare Yourself and more than 100 organizations in the Youth Vote Coalition, among others.
I’ve even heard rumors of concerts with free admission if you have proof of voter registration.
I’ll leave you with some statistics I obtained from MTV’s Choose or Lose/20 Million Loud Campaign:
In the last presidential election, 18 million people ages 18-30 voted, accounting for nearly 16% of the total ballots cast. The election was decided by a margin of 500,000 votes. In some places, the margin was 50,000, 5,000, or even 500. Imagine what might have happened had 20 million young people voted?
That election showed the meaning of the adage “Every vote counts.”
Imagine what could happen in what is shaping up to be one of the nastiest presidential elections our country has ever seen if all 58 million of us vote this November?