Students in the Class of 2012 received a very simple homework assignment from University President Lawrence Bacow during their matriculation ceremony. "All those who are eligible to vote are expected — perhaps I should say required — to vote in the upcoming election on Nov. 4," Bacow said.
In an e-mail to the Daily, he added that this expectation was not limited only to those present at that ceremony. "I would hope that every single Tufts student eligible to cast a ballot will do so. It is the first responsibility of a citizen in a democracy," he said.
These announcements bring attention to the fight for the youth vote on this campus and beyond, an issue that has perplexed politicians for years. Although current trends suggest that today will see a surge of young voters, experts and student activists acknowledge a number of obstacles that could lessen overall turnout.
According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), which is run by the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, 16 million people aged 18-29 voted in 2000. This represented a turnout of 40 percent, which was a slight increase from the 1996 election. In the 2004 cycle, turnout rose to 49 percent. But even in 2004, the youth vote made up only 16 percent of the overall national vote.
David Burstein is a sophomore at Haverford College who has spent the last three years filming and producing "I'm 18 in '08," a documentary that examines past voting trends among young voters and the importance of their turnout in 2008.
Burstein said that the history of the youth vote has been a hilly one. "The highest youth voter turnout was in 1972, when 18-year-olds got the right to vote," he said.
Young-voter turnout since then has been, Burstein said, disappointing to many, hitting a historical low in 1996.
Burstein identified two sets of issues that tend to keep young adults from the polls. "The first is access: Young people are busy and need lots of reminders," he said. "Secondly, young people are the demographic that is the most frustrated with the political process. They don't always see the connection between politics and their lives, and they don't always want to participate."
Like many campuses across the nation, Tufts has played host to a variety of initiatives seeking to combat these two issues by registering voters and helping them figure out the best way to vote on Nov. 4.
Tufts Votes, which is run by the Tisch College, began as a small effort in 2004 to help Tufts students vote in that year's election. In 2006, then-freshman Shana Hurley saw a need to bring the group back to help students involve themselves in that year's midterm elections and beyond.
Junior Emily Hellman, a political science major, is one of the students currently leading the group.
"When you think of voting, you think of Nov. 4," she said. "But our biggest concern this year was registering voters and getting absentee ballots. A lot of the work was done before Election Day."
Both the Tufts Democrats and the Tufts Republicans are involved in voter-turnout efforts on and off campus. Additionally, Tufts Hillel has hosted voter-registration and absentee ballot drives.
Amy Glazier, a sophomore involved with the Hillel initiatives, argued that the efforts of her group and others have helped Tufts edge closer to Bacow's goal, even if most of the students they registered won't actually be going to the polls. "We got most people to register in their home states and request absentee ballots, so the actual Election Day for most Tufts students has already come and gone," Glazier said.
Hellman said that the absentee system can potentially cause confusion on college campuses. "[Voting] takes a lot of time and [there] isn't a consistent system across the states," she said. "It's not easy to do if you haven't spent much time navigating the political system."
Many students lose the chance to vote simply because they get tripped up by the intricacies of the system. "Tufts students are very motivated to vote; our biggest obstacles are bureaucratic ones," Hellman said.
She added that Tufts Votes has been dorm-storming and tabling to help students fill out voter registration and absentee ballot request forms. "We've sent out over 300 forms ourselves and assisted other organizations," she said.
But in spite of such efforts, Hellman said it is difficult to be sure just how many students will have voted by the time polls close today. "Youth voter turnout is always a really hard thing to guess, especially at Tufts, where so much voting is done by absentee ballot and not by regular voting methods."
Political Science Professor Kent Portney said that efforts like those of Hellman and Glazier to register voters will pay off on Election Day.
"In general, these efforts are pretty effective on the margins, motivating people who are inclined to register and vote to actually do so," he said.
Portney added, however, that for students who plan to vote in person, registration is only half the battle. "Usually, getting young people to register is fairly easy, but getting them to actually vote is more of a challenge."
Burstein warned of other, more subtle complications. "Students are also the most likely to be targeted for having improper identification and turned away from the polls," he said, suggesting that student voters take care to ensure that they have multiple forms of valid identification when they go to the polls.
Despite these problems, current trends and polls foreshadow a high youth turnout for this year's election. "We certainly see anecdotal evidence that registration is up considerably, particularly for college students," Portney said. "We also see evidence that college students say they intend to vote at pretty high levels this year."
Burstein believes that the youth vote will mirror an overall increase in voter turnout. "People have been standing in huge long lines just for early voting, as the economic crisis is driving things home for people," he said. "They see [this election] as having an impact on their lives."
Burstein added that the youth vote may even exceed expectations. "Ultimately, we've seen young people get very excited and involved with this election, and they've proven that they want to turn out," he said.
According to Burstein, of 9 million newly registered voters for the 2008 election, 6.5 million are considered young voters.
Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE, believes that younger voters can have a profound effect on the election, should they meet or exceed expectations. "More than half of eligible youth may vote," Levine said in an e-mail. "If current polls prove accurate, they will support Obama by about 2:1 and would be part of the reason for his victory."
A high youth-voter turnout would almost certainly work in favor of Democratic candidate Barack Obama (D-Ill.), but sophomore Michael Hawley, president of the Tufts Republicans, does not believe that this will necessarily determine the election. "A lot of the Republican constituency are older voters and reliable in a way that youth voters are not," he said.
Burstein, however, said that he believes the high level of student and young adult involvement throughout the presidential campaign will be reflected on Election Day.
"You saw in the Iowa caucuses that young voters made the difference. If young people do have the potential to be a swing bloc, they can affect states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, which have huge populations of students and young voters," he said.
As young-voter enthusiasm levels will affect the outcome of this presidential election, so too will the outcome of the election affect future levels.
Burstein explained that the winner of this election will have to work to maintain and increase voter engagement. "People who vote once are likely to vote again," Burstein said. "But it's about engaging people in the governing process — it's much easier to get people involved in a campaign."
Levine added that, high or low, voter turnout in this election will reveal a great deal about the political engagement of young voters. "Even though voting is only a small part of civic engagement, it is easily measurable and it tends to reflect the level of people's overall interest and responsibility," he said. "When voting falls, other forms of engagement usually fall as well."
