Young Voter Registration Gap: New data Shows Under 25% Registered in PA & OH, Under 50% in NY & NJ
The Voter Registration Gap is huge: ~75% of those age 45+ are registered to vote. High school students and their communities have the power to close the gap.
High school students across the country are asking a lot of questions about democracy, elections, and how to get involved.
If you’re looking for a way to help them connect, here’s one way to start: show them the numbers and show them what they can do about it.
Many high school students don’t know about voter registration. They don’t know any of the following, and neither do most adults:
Young people can register to vote before they turn 18. More than half of teens in the US can preregister by age 16–that means there’s two full years for most teens to register during high school.
The majority of young people regularly turn out in big elections if they are registered
In 2022, 64% of registered 18-year-olds turned out nationally, just 12 percentage points below the average for all registered adults.
In 2018, 72% of registered 18-year-olds voted, and there was just a 9 point gap between that rate and the rate for all registered adults.
Existing systems are missing the youngest voters. Most state online voter registration systems require a driver’s license or state ID, and millions of teens who are old enough to register don’t drive.
A big reason candidates, campaigns, and pollsters ignore young voters is because they are registered at such low rates, making them functionally invisible.
I believe that free and fair elections are more likely when everyone is registered and has an opportunity to participate.
Young people can make a difference by registering to vote and learning how to run a voter registration drive in their high school to engage their whole community.
If you agree, please take a moment to see how far we are from that today.
Right now in Ohio, there is a 66 percentage point registration gap separating 18-year-olds from older voters. In Pennsylvania, it’s 65 points. In both New York and New Jersey, it’s more than 40 points.
The gap is much smaller in Michigan and North Carolina, the two other states we are currently tracking. Both allow preregistration beginning at age 16, but in North Carolina the gap is still more than 25 points, and in Michigan it is more than 10. Adding those states to the mix, more than 500,000 18-year-olds are unregistered today, in these six states alone. You can see what this looks like on a county-by-county basis with our color-shaded maps.
Sit down with a young person in your life and get curious about the data together. What role does policy play? What role do demographics play? And what role can you play?
Share this post or use one of the sharing buttons for the data visualizations to invite a friend to do the same.
Get engaged. Get active. Ask the teens in your life to do the same. Encourage them to lead a voter registration drive this spring as part of our Cap, Gown & Ballot campaign.
They may not all be interested. Or they may not be interested right away. But the thought may stick with them. My friends and I are being left out, but it doesn’t have to be that way, and we can make a difference. And if enough people ask, then who knows.
That’s our theory anyway, and if you’ve been looking for a way to strengthen democracy, we hope it will be yours, too.