Our Class of 2022 Ready to Vote Challenge is off to a great start! The Challenge, which has over 40 co-sponsor organizations, is focused on ensuring high school seniors are registered to vote before they graduate.
People who accept our challenge pledge to ask every high school senior they know to register to vote before graduation. Those who take the pledge will receive 10 free Class of 2022 Register to Vote stickers with QR codes that link to our registration portal (while supplies last). We’ve also created a Digital Toolkit that includes graphics, social media posts, and other resources that can be used to encourage youth voter registration.
With 4 million high school students graduating each year, there is great potential for high levels of youth voter engagement. In fact, in the 2018 midterm elections, 66% of registered youth turned out to vote. The problem of low youth turnout is not that young people don’t vote, but that young people aren’t registered. The Challenge aims to provide support to those 4 million graduating students, to make sure they register to vote and take the first step in becoming lifelong voters.
We created a resource to help community groups, parents, and volunteers focus their efforts on specific school districts. Our School District Graduation Calendar lists the graduation season dates for the most populous districts in each state. This is a great starting point for encouraging students and educators to plan registration drives at their schools in connection with graduation.
Throughout the graduation season, we’re offering high school voter registration workshops, which go over the best strategies for holding registration drives at schools. There is still time to make an impact in most districts before the end of the school year. We hope you’ll act now to take the pledge and encourage seniors to register to vote.
Note: Some districts have not yet posted their graduation dates and others, we’ve found, have slightly changed the dates since publishing them. If you would like to see a district included in this calendar, or if you have any updates to the information in it, please email [email protected].