Emily Atkinson (Smith) on the Challenges of Expanding Millennial Voter Turnout

So you’d think that the people most heavily invested in social media—the young millennials about to cast their first or second ballots in a U.S. presidential election—would be lining up in droves, even more excited to express their opinion in a forum with a huge, tangible outcome, than were the young people of 2008.

But we aren’t. And among all 18-29 year olds, even the ones who plan on voting, almost a third are undecided as to who will get their votes, according to Susan Saulny of the New York Times. And that’s a big group; according to The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE, 24% of all eligible voters are 18-29 years old. That’s 46 million people, and 17 million of them will, like me, be voting for the very first time in November. New voters in this election are age 18-21, so some of them, like me, barely missed the 2008 election, while others were only 14 at the time. In the same New York Times article, John Della Volpe, who is the director of polling at the Harvard Institute of Politics, was described as saying that 18-24 year olds don’t have a direct connection to the Obama youth movement of 2008. Yet some of my peers were already voting in 2008, so 21-24 year olds certainly remember that election, and many of them voted in it. But the young people to whom the New York Times spoke didn’t sound nearly as excited about voting, if they planned to vote at all, a contrast with how I remember my high school friends who had already turned 18 four years ago and couldn’t wait to cast their first vote, whether it was for Obama or McCain. With our constant desire to make our opinions known to anyone who will listen—or, even better, read them online and like, share, retweet, and reblog them to a whole new audience—it’s disheartening that many young millennials in particular seem disillusioned not just with one party, or with both major parties, but with the political system in general. But can social media change anything about the reasons we aren’t excited to vote in the month and a half until election day?

There are a few major reasons why I think we’re much more reluctant to vote than to post endless opinions about everything on the Internet. First of all, voting requires you to leave your room. Second of all, it lacks the immediate gratification of all your friends’ validation through likes and comments that Facebook and other sites have, though I actually think this is one area in which social media can help make some gains in young voter turnout. But more on that later. An article from Oklahoma Christian University’s paper, The Talon, notes several other obstacles to students’ voting: the confusion of registering to vote, particularly for out of state students; transportation to polling places; and, perhaps most importantly, time, something hard to come by for everyone. At least at Smith, however, many professors have written “VOTE!” on their syllabi for November 6th, and seem more eager than some of the students for the big day, so we, at least, have little excuse. But college students aren’t known for doing everything their professors want—which may be where social media comes in.

Used properly, I think social media can push youth voter turnout higher, up to and maybe especially on Election Day. I see a lot of political ads and posts popping up on Facebook and Twitter, but what I haven’t seen are reminders of the date of the election, or of voter registration deadlines for the appropriate state, something students who might want to vote are liable to forget about and miss. Displaying this information everywhere and often, with links to polling places and instructions for how to register to vote in the appropriate state, seems to me to be the best way to insure high turnout (and use Facebook’s increasingly stalkerlike tendencies for good), especially for people like me, who plan to vote but think every year that Election Day is November 2, because that’s what it was in the first election I remember, and who also sometimes forget what day it is because they are lurking in libraries writing their theses for unhealthy numbers of hours every week.

Perhaps neither sides’ Super PACs want to take out ads for this because they’re hoping people on the other side will just forget to vote, which is a valid strategy but not quite the democratic ideal for which we are supposed to strive as a nation. But that’s okay, because while I do think such ads would help voter turnout, they’re not actually the main way I think social media will increase it in this election. The best way to get young people to do something, especially millennials who spend so much time and energy garnering likes, retweets, reblogs, and followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, is through old-fashioned peer pressure, and will come to bear on Election Day itself, when each of us goes out, votes, and comes home to tell the world, instructing our friends and acquaintances through statuses, tweets, and .gifs to do as we’ve done and GO VOTE! It may reawaken our excitement, or just instill us with a sense of civic duty, or make us go, “Well, if they all did, I guess I can go vote too,” but I think it will have an effect. What that effect will be, and which candidate it will benefit, is yet to be seen, but it’s one more thing to watch for on November 6th, because it seems clearer and clearer that social media are a large part of the battlefield upon which elections are going to be fought in the 21st century.