Illinois Expands High School Voter Registration with the Jesse Jackson Youth Voter Empowerment Act
Will the Land of Lincoln give Michigan and Minnesota a run for their money when it comes to high school voter registration?
““Voting is a benefit you inherited [that] another generation earned … You can’t invoke Mandela and King and be unregistered … I travel because I have counted the cost.
Your vote does make a difference.””
Today, I’m celebrating the Illinois Legislature and Governor JB Pritzker for enacting and signing HB 4339, The Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. Youth Voter Empowerment Act.
With this law, Illinois becomes the 10th state with a statutory requirement that high schools provide their students with an opportunity to register to vote. Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington all have similar laws. California Governor Gavin Newsom has twice vetoedsimilar legislation in California.
The new Illinois law is the state’s latest step to improve youth political participation, including the enactment in 2023 of SB 2123, which enables teens to preregister beginning at age 16. Today, 20 states and DC have laws that allow preregistration at age 16 or earlier. They include eight of the top 10 states according to our ranking of registration rates for 18-year-olds in the 39 states for which we have data.
Why is the new Illinois law, requiring high schools to provide an opportunity to register to vote, a big deal? After all, whether by statute or social studies standards, every state authorizes high schools to teach students about voter registration. That’s the least they can do given the civic mission of schools and the urgent need to prepare students for effective participation.
Prior to the enactment of HB 4339, Illinois already required the distribution of a one-page informational document describing the process to register to vote and banned high schools from prohibiting nonpartisan voter registration activities. The state’s social studies standards already provided that all high school students should know about participation in “elections, voting, and the electoral process.”
Without a state mandate, however, or other express requirement to provide an opportunity to register, the job too often does not get done. This is especially true in under-resourced communities, and the result is that students of lower economic means frequently remain unregistered and unable to vote at rates far higher than their peers in higher-income areas.
More broadly, the absence of policies and traditions supporting high school voter registration contributes to the widespread disenfranchisement of young people in most states.
Nationwide, more than 16 million students are in US high schools today. As they come of age, virtually all of them are impacted by state laws, policies, practices, and systems that simultaneously require them to register in order to vote, and at the same time fail to provide mechanisms to reliably enable them to do so.
Nationally, based on the most recent data available, only 42% of 18-year-olds are registered, meaning that more than 2.5 million 18-year-olds are not. In some states, including New Hampshire and Idaho, the registration rate for 18-year-olds stands at 10% or lower as of our most recent data.
Today, low levels of youth political participation is one of the most serious, misunderstood, and under-appreciated problems in American democracy. It is also one of the most fixable. We know because states are fixing it. Among them are Michigan and Minnesota, Illinois neighbors, both of which boast registration rates for 18-year-olds above 70%.
Illinois is on a trajectory that could let it catch up. Back in the summer of 2022, only 23% of Illinois 18-year-olds were registered. But as of May 2026, Illinois gained 22 percentage points with 45% of 18-year-olds registered, placing it in the top half among the 39 states for which we have data.
A 40 percentage point gap remains between the registration rate of the state’s 18-year-olds and voters ages 45 and above. 160,000 young people turn 18 every year in Illinois, and 91,000 more could be voting if all of them were registered.
One of the most exciting things about high school voter registration is that it has a history. It has a present, and it has a future. We see gains across the country, bringing the concept to life. Sometimes it’s students, parents, and educators in the lead, and sometimes it’s public officials, enacting policies to make the practice permanent and universal.
Jesse Jackson passed away in February 2026, and the naming of the law in his honor gives tribute to his legacy as a civil rights leader who believed in and fought for the power of marginalized communities and young people. Chicago was his home and headquarters for more than 60 years.
We hope the law will inspire other states to pass similar laws and that readers will join us in encouraging the high school students in their lives to learn how to run a voter registration drive this fall. To do so, visit thecivicscenter.org/hsvrw.
