Almost 800,000 18-year-olds who are not yet registered can still vote on November 3. Has anyone told them?
Election Day is less than two weeks away. That means my mailbox is full of election mail. The various campaigns gleaned my name from the voter file, recognized that I am a regular voter who hadn’t voted yet, and assessed through their targeted analysis that it’s worth spending a portion of their budget on printing and postage to get their message to me.
Honestly, they are wasting their money. I have voted now and would have done so anyway, whether they barrage me with mailers or not, and I throw their glossy mailers away without looking at them. Ok, some of them are mildly amusing or just plain odd, so I will admit sometimes they get a chuckle out of me on my way to the recycling. But that’s about it. The impact is the same. Which is to say zero.
The people who most likely are not getting these mailers, are the hundreds of thousands of Californians who will be old enough to vote for the first time this November and who are not yet in the voter file. Under California law, if they are otherwise eligible, they can show up through Election Day and cast a provisional ballot. Their votes count the same as mine. So why are their mailboxes empty?
As of this summer, nearly 300,000 eligible 18-year-olds in California weren’t yet in the voter file, and nearly 70,000 in Los Angeles County alone, where I live, didn’t appear in the file. That’s a lot of future voters who can still make their voices heard through Nov. 3.
And that’s just the 18-year-olds.
My estimate is that more than 1 million young Californians ages 18-24 will have a right to vote on Election Day or during early voting, which is going on now, but won’t appear in the voter file in advance. It’s not just California:
More than half of US states allow eligible voters to cast provisional ballots either on Election Day, during early voting, or both, whether they’ve made it into the voter file in advance or not.
This chart shows the number of 18-year-olds in the 22 states (plus DC) that offer Election Day voting even if you are not in the voter file in advance. Almost half of them had not registered, and therefor did not yet appear in the voter file, when we last checked.
And if you’re a regular reader of this Substack, you probably know what I’m about to say next: the low level of registration is not due to some inherent flaw of young people. For the most part, it’s because no one bothered to ask them or to explain how to do it and why it matters. And most candidates, even those with gobs of money for mailers, aren’t doing it either. That incudes those paying pricy consultants with the more than 10 BILLION DOLLARS already spent for the midterms. Imagine if just .01% of that were spent building the onramp to democracy instead of on throw-away mailers and tune-out ads! But I digress.
Eagle-eyed readers may rightly point out that I said in the headline that there is an opportunity in “more than half” of US states, and the chart only talks about 22 states and DC.
It’s not a counting error. There are four additional states that allow provisional voting during all or part of their early voting period for those who aren’t yet in the voter file, but don’t allow it on Election Day itself. These extra opportunities are in Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, and North Carolina ¹ . So now we’re up to 26, and more than half.
But how much difference does the Election Day opportunity matter for first timers? The answer is a lot.
We looked at the voter files for 4 of the states for which registration deadlines don’t serve as a block to Election Day voting.
They all see far more 18-year-olds making it into the voter file on Election Day than any other day of the year. The other biggest sign up days are deadlines for online registration and dates associated with state primaries.
And, this really should not be a surprise, but turnout correlates positively with allowing voting for eligible voters who haven’t signed up in advance.
Yes, I know that correlation doesn’t show causation, but still, the chart is pretty. And I like the idea of trying to get to the high end, rather than getting stuck in the middle or at the bottom.
Young people – because they are registered at such low rates – often become aware of elections in the final weeks of campaigns, as more and more money is spent on advertising, but that is often well after early registration deadlines. Plus they are highly mobile compared to other demographic groups, making early registration more challenging for them. The result is millions of voices left unheard, cycle after cycle.
So you can draw your own conclusions – or maintain your own doubts – about whether allowing all eligible voters to vote on Election Day is important. But I’m on the side of the logic that says that it is, and if we agree that democracy works best when it includes everyone, then we must lower the barriers to our newest voters, and help welcome them.
¹ Other notes for folks who love the details: Many, but not all, of the states on our list allow voting during both early voting and Election Day for eligible voters who did not sign up in advance. The chart does not distinguish among these states. We included North Dakota on our list of states that allow voting on Election Day, although North Dakota does not have a general voter registration requirement. Connecticut allows Election Day registration during general elections, but not primaries. The Montana legislature in 2022 passed legislation to limit its Election Day registration period to just a few hours – 8am-noon. I’d love to see the testimony and notes of the meetings that led to that effort. How many of the legislators were motivated by the fact that young people often sleep late? In 2024, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that the effort violated the state constitution. Good.