A Pro-Democracy Action for Your Community: Get Students Registered to Vote
A how-to guide for getting all high school students registered and ready to vote in their first election. Bonus: you can also help many 16-year-olds get ready for 2028!
I started The Civics Center when I first learned about pre-registration, and since then I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops. Unfortunately, it remains woefully unknown and under-utilized, or we wouldn’t be looking at such low rates of registration among 18-year-olds.
So we created a new resource designed just for up-and-coming voters, and the adults in their community who know our democracy works best when every voice is heard.
With little promotion, we’ve seen great results, including partner organizations requesting to embed our map on their own websites, an increase in overall traffic, and clear evidence that high school students are finding the pages and following through by registering to vote.
Our goal now is to help pro-democracy advocates integrate these resources with their existing efforts at building a bulwark against authoritarianism.
4 million Americans turn 18 every year, and typically only 30% get registered to vote in time for midterms. But when they do register, they turn out in big elections at high rates. The opportunity is enormous.
My dream is that at the start, end, or break in every zoom meeting about postcards, text-banking, or expert analysis of the latest challenges to democracy, everyone attending will take 2 minutes to text a friend or post on social media about up-and-coming voters and the urgent need to get them registered to vote.
Let’s dive in.
Start by hovering over each state to understand the different pre-registration rules.
Then click on a state to find everything you will need:
the applicable pre-18 registration rule;
upcoming elections and registration deadlines;
ID requirements; the number of people turning 18 every year in the state or the number who remain unregistered;
instructions for pre-registering online and by mail;
laws requiring high schools to help with voter registration (many of which are unknown or ignored);
access to toolkits and training opportunities for educators;
the ability to download paper forms (for the majority of high school students who are old enough to register but who cannot do so online because of limitations in their state’s system);
and calls to action (register to vote, learn how to run a drive, share this information etc).
Now, is the fun part. It’s not a what question, but a who question.
Who do you know who should know about this? Is it a teen, a parent, a teacher, a public official, a nonprofit leader who works with students or teachers, an influencer, a friend who is none of these but has her own connections to them? Is it everyone with whom you are connected on social media?
It can take a little practice to build up your ability to use these resources. It’s like exercising a muscle. Be patient with yourself. You can start small by making a list of just 3 people. What do you see in our resources that is new to you and that they should know? Add it to your list.
Now take the list and execute. Send three messages. If it feels ok, do it again. If you are involved in a group, you don’t need to work in isolation. Bring this to your group, brainstorm together, or invite us to attend.
If you click share this info, you’ll have the chance to share on social channels. Make a birthday wish or a graduation wish, for example, or tell everyone in your life about upcoming deadlines and the huge impact we all can make when we help teens register before they turn 18.
Tell the teens in your life. Tell the groups you are involved in. Tell parents and educators. Set a goal for yourself. Become as obsessed as we are.
Like Timothy Snyder says in On Tyranny,
“Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.”
How would the world change if you and 9 others reading this say yes? And then ten more, 100 more, 1000 more, and all of the teens to whom you are connected? It takes the first one and the first ten to make that happen. Will you give it a try?