Youth Voting

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters.

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

While many see voting as an implicit right in a representative democracy, decisions in America about who can vote and how are actually controlled by the states and vary greatly from state-to-state, even from county-to-county.

Misinformation and misinterpretation of each state's particular laws—not only by voters, but also by state officials—has the potential to influence the outcome of the election, a problem seen recently as two of the country’s most disenfranchised groups – youth and former felons –have encountered procedural roadblocks to electoral participation.

Large voter registration drives are underway in Virginia, but the Roanoke Times has recently reported on problems that may hinder the participation of Virginia students. According to Kevin Litten of the Roanoke Times on Saturday, allegations of voter intimidation came out of Virginia Tech last week, when Montgomery County Registrar Randy Wertz issued a news release warning students that registering using their college addresses would be changing their permanent addresses. This, according to Wertz, could “affect student’s scholarships or tax filings, and would obligate them to change car registrations and their driver's licenses.”

Litten reports that officials from the Obama campaign, which has been conducting voter registration activities in Virginia, countered that “they had never heard of students' dependency status on their parents' tax forms affected by their voter registration,” and that the “other laws mentioned in the release are rarely enforced or subject to interpretation.” The officials worried that the statements could have a “chilling effect” on voter registration efforts, but Wertz denied that intimidating students was his intention, insisting that “his focus is making sure elections run smoothly and fairly.”

Fair and smooth elections become even more difficult when more voters are involved and the state is ill prepared. Wednesday's Roanoke Times expressed concerns that the influx of newly registered students—assigned to what is already the county's most populated precinct—could create long lines and transportation problems on Election Day.

The precinct, E-1, already has 3,600 active voters; the state is required to split precincts when they exceed 5,000 voters, but officials say it is too late to obtain Justice Department approval for the split if E-1 exceeds capacity before November. To at least help alleviate the waiting period to vote, officials say they are making efforts to hire extra officials to run the polls. But, to make matters worse, the polling place assigned for the precinct is located four miles from campus without connecting public transportation – a potential problem for students without cars.

Whereas young people are subject to roadblocks and intimidation due to unclear regulations and ill-equipped precincts, many former felons remain unaware of their right to vote period.

“A lot of people, especially women, don't know they still count when they come home...they need to know that they can vote and maybe things will change,” said Willeta Hughes in the Michigan Citizen. Hughes “was told in 1998 that she couldn’t go to law school or vote as a result of a concealed weapons charge that led to a felony conviction.”

Hughes is part of a Michigan pilot program to help engage former felons in the voting process and ultimately in their communities. The program, Unlock the Vote, was started by Neila Johnson to help combat misinformation “disseminated from inside the Corrections Department itself” that told many felons, including Johnson's sister, that they had permanently lost their voting rights.

Before 2007, Florida had one of the toughest felon-disenfranchisement laws, which permanently revoked voting rights of all felons unless individually restored by the Clemency Board. Nearly one million ex-felons were not allowed to vote in the last presidential election, according to the Sentencing Project. Last year Governor Charlie Crist changed Florida law to automatically restore the voting rights of nonviolent criminals after release.

“Thousands of ex-convicts have had their rights restored but don't know it, or don't realize they are eligible to register as voters. The state has been unable to notify them because it has lost track of them,” Kaczor wrote. Only 9,000 of those former felons were registered by the end of July, according to an August 27 Orlando Sentinel report.

Last week Crist issued an executive order requiring officials to provide voter registration cards and the ability to track voter registration status online for certain former felons. According to Bill Kaczor of the Associated Press, this long-awaited effort to help former felons restore their civil rights is being seen by many as “a lost opportunity,” as only five weeks remain to register before the Nov. 4 election.

More than 5.3 million felons across the nation are prohibited from voting, and less than one quarter of eligible young voters turned out to vote in the 2006 midterm election. These untapped voting blocs are often silenced thanks to poorly managed state control of election administration, which puts the burden on voters to seek registration.

One way to resolve some of these issues is to continue to inform voters of their rights and have outside parties help them register to vote. However, as state variance in election administration has shown, these steps alone are not enough to address the bias in the electorate and promote full participation in elections.

Another approach, as noted by the Advancement Project in the Washington Daily News this week, would be to make voting a federal, constitutional right. Citing numerous disenfranchisement instances since 2000 due to “bizarre and erratic state customs” - including 12 elderly nuns without voter ID in Indiana, and thousands of rejected voter applicants who didn't check a box on the application in Florida – the group said “it is time to rectify this patchwork of bizarre and erratic state customs. We need to put the right to vote in the Constitution.”

Quick Links:

“In Pursuit of an Affirmative Right to Vote.” Advancement Project. July 2008.

In Other News:

Some New York officials worry about voting access - Associated Press
ALBANY, N.Y.-Cliff Perez is legally blind and would like to vote without help this fall. Instead, he will have to count on his wife's assistance with New York's ancient pull lever machines, rather than use brand new $12,000 voting devices designed to give independence to the disabled.

Early absentee voting changes campaign strategies in Montana - Missoulian [Mont.]
HELENA - For nearly 200,000 voters in Montana this fall, Election Day may come early, via absentee ballots - and campaigns are adjusting to this new reality.

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

The New York Times writes about the transition for some some young ex-Clinton staffers now working for Obama in Chicago.

A piece in the Flint (MI) Journal examines new social networking and media tools and their connection to an increase in youth political engagement this fall. Unfortunately, this article includes an example of the Republican strategic pessimism regarding the youth vote:

Facebook won't win any elections, said Harry Awdey, president of UM-Flint's College Republicans.

"We're trying to energize who we have out there but a lot of young people aren't going to vote," he said. "It seems like every couple of years they say it's going to be the year of the youth vote and it hasn't been yet.

"I'd like to think people are more civilly engaged but it's really that voter participation was so low that it had nowhere to go but up."

Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight.com fame) pens a good, if simple op-ed in the New York Post on the importance of the youth vote to Obama and why a surge in youth turnout appears likely this November.

Another piece -- this one in the Pioneer Press (MN) -- examines the paradox of a young, technology-obsessed McCain supporter supporting a 71 year old man who doesn't do email. Here's a sneak peek:

Andy Brehm is an e-mailaholic who frequently logs onto his Facebook social networking page to chat with his friends over the Web.

But the man he wants to be the nation's next president doesn't do any of those things.

Brehm, 27, a recent law school graduate, is as tech savvy as they come. John McCain, 71, the presumptive Republican nominee, once said he's never done "a Google."

...

"To be honest, I'd rather the president not spend his time e-mailing," Brehm said. "There are more important things to deal with. This country has some real serious problems that big government and higher taxes aren't going to fix."

A localized example of the surge in Democratic registrations this year: Boulder, Colorado.

Reuters speculates whether hip-hop could help or burden Barack Obama.

Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE, noted in his blog yesterday the Gallup poll that was released at the end of July showing Obama losing ground to McCain, even among youth. Levine correctly points out that Gallup's sample size of likely young voters was 10% when, in 2004, youth formed between 16% and 18% of the electorate. As Levine reminds us, young voters are usually always undersampled in "likely voter" polling screens due to little or no previous voting experience.

(Table courtesy of NationalJournal.com)

But I thought Levine's main point was very instructive: if youth are sampled at their 2004 rate or one similar, McCain loses. If they are sampled at this rate, he wins.

More directly -- if youth turn out, Obama wins. If they don't, McCain does. It doesn't get much more elementary or inspiring than that.

Mark Blumenthal at National Journal has a nice write-up on this, too.

Mike already posted a link to E.J. Dionne's column in today's Washington Post. If you haven't already done so, do yourself a favor and read it. It's great to see a traditional columnist get this right.

What I want to pay attention to is the concluding paragraph. Dionne ends with a flourish, pointing out what drives most of our work and thoughts these days.

Young Americans show all the signs of being interested enough and upset enough to flock to the polls this year. If they do, they could be the most politically consequential generation since the cohort of the Great Depression and World War II. Think of these newcomers as the Engaged Generation.

Notice how Dionne leaves out the Boomers from his assessment and prediction. The Boomers were perpetually upset, and they made sure everyone knew it. And sure, the culture of the time -- when you think of the 1960s -- was chaotic. Young people fueled most of the protests and ongoing social movements. The Boomers were very consequential socially.

But think about the potential of this generation shocking everyone by lining up at the polls this November. Think about a 55+ percent turnout among 18-25 year olds. And don't just think about what the pundits -- those that have been resisting the evidence of a pattern of increased youth voting the last few years -- would do, but think about the ramifications for our political -- and social -- world. Most likely, Obama would be elected. Democrats would sweep into power, and perhaps, if there's a huge wave, into a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. But more importantly, politicians would be forced to pay even more attention to the issues we want addressed. Better infrastructure, better access to higher education, universal health insurance, an increased focus on the environment, better care and opportunities for veterans -- a plethora of policy informed by the common good.

That is politically consequential and socially consequential.

Again, great column -- must-read material.

Cross-posted at Project Vote's Voting Matters Blog

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

In 2000, Florida’s disastrous effort to purge former felons from voter rolls resulted in the disenfranchisement of hundreds if not thousands of legitimate voters and clearly influenced the outcome of the presidential contest in that state. History may repeat itself this November with states taking potentially reckless and unlawful measures to clean voter rolls before Election Day.

Voter purges are one of several problems in the administration of elections that could not only bar legal voters from the polls, but could potentially influence the outcome of close races. Project Vote is monitoring this practice across the United States and sees what could be an alarming trend of illegal purging emerging. The New York Times and Mississippi's Clarion Ledger both reported on voter purging problems in the South this week.

Keeping accurate and current voter rolls is an important legal mandate for election officials. Under the National Voter Registration Act, states are required to contact voters directly through forwardable mail. If the voter does not respond, the state must wait two federal elections before removing the voter from the rolls. However, many states have begun to compare their voter rolls with those of neighboring states and pro-actively canceling a voter's registration based on a positive “match” rather than following the list maintenance procedures of NVRA.

Project Vote has recently expressed concern to Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne over the state's method of removing voters from rolls, as reported in the Times on Tuesday. Project Vote has learned that Louisiana compares voter lists with other jurisdictions, purging voters solely upon apparent database matches of first name, last name and birth date. With millions of people living in a multi-state region, it is not uncommon to find more than one John Smith born on the same day. Additionally, the possibility of human and typographical error that occur in all large databases creates a greater risk of unjustified disenfranchisement.

“A spokesman for Louisiana's secretary of state said that all voters found to have duplicate registrations were sent at least one warning letter and sometimes two, but that the last such actions were done some 13 months ago,” the Times reported.

“'We're specifically not doing it right in front of an election,'” said Dardenne's spokesman.
Election officials in Madison County, Miss. have recently decided to forgo a potentially illegal mass mailing process as part of their effort to purge the county’s voter rolls after the U.S. Justice Department and others warned against it, according the Clarion Ledger Tuesday. Last week, Project Vote sent a letter to the elections commission out of concern that their mass mailing plan violated the Voting Rights Act.

“They are doing something that is understandable when you have a voter roll that appears to be out of proportion,” said voting rights lawyers who works with Project Vote, Estelle Rogers. “But there are a lot of Ps and Qs that must be followed.”

County supervisor Karl Banks repeatedly voted against the mass mailing, saying that “his understanding of the law was that commissioners needed a reason to believe that a voter's information may not be accurate.” He argued that in this presidential election year, the commission should focus on making sure elections run smoothly, such as informing people of their correct precinct.

“The mildest things confuse people and can ultimately disenfranchise people during elections...Here we are wanting to disenfranchise people because they don't send a card back?”

The emerging trend of state compacts to compare voter databases and engage in aggressive efforts to purge their voter rolls is troubling for both its opacity – the public is not informed of the criteria for being purged nor are purged voters offered the chance to remedy the situation – and its reliance on strict matching criteria. Large databases are riddled with errors, therefore the sole reliance on exact matches virtually guarantees that legal voters will be knocked off the rolls and denied the right to vote.
The Florida example from 2000 should be instructive on on how these practices could affect the outcome of closely contested races on Election Day.

Quick Links:

Contact:

Louisiana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne

Madison County (Miss.) Board of Supervisors

Reports:

“Maintaining Current and Accurate Voters Lists.” Project Vote. Dec. 22, 2006.

“A Summary of the National Voter Registration Act.” Project Vote.

“A Summary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Project Vote.

In Other News:

Federal judge weighs challenge to AZ voter id law - Tucson Citizen [Ariz.]
PHOENIX (AP) -- A federal judge is weighing a challenge to Arizona requirements for voter identification and proof of citizenship for registering to vote.

County voter drive blocked: Fewer New Citizens Registered After US Agency Changes Rule - Mercury News [Ca.]
It was a procedure that produced a bumper crop of new voters: Just before Santa Clara County immigrants were sworn in as U.S. citizens, they got voter-registration cards and were shown how to fill them out. At the conclusion of the naturalization ceremony, most new citizens had signed the cards and handed them in to become registered voters.

State Says It May Sue VA - Associated Press
Connecticut officials say the state might sue the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs if it continues to block efforts to educate and register voters in federal veterans' facilities.

Voter-sign-up drive targets 16-year olds - Miami Herald
Voter registration for next month's primary election will end Monday, and the push now is aimed at teens who are too young to cast a ballot

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

I am enthralled with Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE). 
 
He has made news lately with suspicions of joining Barack Obama as a possible Vice President or cabinet member or at the very least giving Obama an endorsement for President. 
 
Chuck Hagel had me watching him long before the media picked up on his independent spirit of leadership.  Time magazine has given him the label of “hero to liberals” even though he has a strong Republican voting record in the Senate.
 
So, when I found out Chuck Hagel was in Lincoln to sign his new book “America Our Next Chapter: Tough Questions, Straight Answers” I had to go check him out.  He greeted each one of the over 500 people there with such true joy; he is made to be in politics.  He loves politics.

I first read an interview with Senator Hagel in a magazine called Nebraska Life.  After several pages of learning about him growing up in the Sandhills of Nebraska, he said something that grabbed me, something that made me realize he is both a man of conviction but also a dreamer.  He said:
 
“You run for office because you want to influence policy, to influence the direction of the country; you attempt to attain to some power to exert that influence, to change the course of the world. This business should be about one thing, making a better world for all people.”
 
I asked Senator Hagel about this quote at his book signing, here is what he had to say:

 
With all the speculation around Senator Hagel joining the Obama team as a possible choice for Vice President or a cabinet member, I was curious to know how he viewed his campaign so far—in particular around the youth vote since in his book he dedicates a chapter to talking about his own kids who are in high school being more engaged in their community, a show of his knowledge that the Millennials are a different generation.  He gives props to Obama while talking about how critical it is for young people to be engaged at high levels in politics:
 

 
Lastly, in Senator Hagel’s book he talks about the health care crisis facing America.  Since young people are the number one age group among the uninsured, I was curious to know about one particular part of health care—mental health parity.  I wanted to know Senator Hagel’s perspective on why mental health parity has yet to pass both the Senate and the House, here is his explanation:
 

 
Nebraska was lucky to have Chuck Hagel as our Senator for the past 11 years.  While he is retiring this year, and there is a competitive race for his seat, he will be greatly missed.  Although, I don’t think we will have to wait that long to see Senator Hagel take on a new post in politics.  He simply loves it too much and it is clear this is a true calling for him.

PS: Thank you to Senator Chuck Hagel’s staff, especially his Chief of Staff Mike Buttry, who made sure the Senator answered all of my questions even though they had plenty more events to attend that night.

Jane Fleming Kleeb is the Executive Director of the Young Voter PAC which helps Democratic candidates and State Parties win with the 18-35 year-old vote through endorsements, on-the-ground support, training, strategy and money.  She is a regular on Fox and MSNBC.

November 6^th--Election Day 2007--is just around the corner for folks in many states. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need to be convinced to target young people to vote in the upcoming elections. If you still need convincing, you might want to check out an article in the Politico that laid out some statistics.

The bottom line is if you target and talk to young people they will vote. Not rocket science, true enough. But with Election Day looming for many campaign staffers, volunteers and candidates, the Young Voter PAC thought we would offer up 5 activities that your campaign can do to get 18-35 year-olds to the polls. Don’t fret if you have not started targeting young voters yet. You still have time since many young people, and yes even older voters, don’t pay attention until right at the end.

Each idea below is linked to an organization that has done these activities many times and they should be looked to as a resource for more detailed information and sample materials. Don’t reinvent the wheel, young voter groups like those below, are here as a resource.

1. Go Trick or Voting. Get a bunch of volunteers and your candidate and head to neighborhood streets and community Halloween parties. Create signs saying “Don’t Be Tricked By (insert other candidate’s name), Vote (insert your candidate’s name)” and have volunteers carry the signs. You can even make old-school sandwich boards for volunteers to wear. Get volunteers to dress up as famous Democrats or people that highlight progressive issues that the campaign has focused on during the election cycle (e.g. nurses and doctors to symbolize health care for all). Use this Halloween holiday as a creative time to reiterate your message, get some earned media and increase visibility.
2. Create “Pledge to Vote” cards. Research (and common sense) tells us that if a young person “pledges” to vote they vote in higher numbers. Groups like YDA and the PIRGs have been using pledge cards for years and it works. Simply create the pledge to vote cards and arm your volunteers with clipboards. Create fun contest to have them compete with one another to get as many pledge cards in a few hours. Use the information on the pledge cards (make sure you get name, email, cell, address) to contact young voters before and on Election Day.
3. Do a bar crawl. You can also choose to do a coffee house crawl, an elementary school crawl, a supermarket crawl….you get the point. Any place where 18-35 year-olds hang out in your targeted areas is where you want to send the candidate and a group of energetic volunteers. Make sure you all wear campaign t-shirts and bring quarter-sheet sized information flyers about your candidate. When you go to places where young people hang out, they don’t want to lug around a big pamphlet, so all you need to do is use some text from existing lit, give it a younger spin and create it so there are 4 flyers per page. Make sure the info sheets on your candidate have the date of the election, where someone can find their polling location and the number to call if they face problems voting. You can even bring “Pledge to Vote” cards to the bar crawl to make the crawl more effective since this way you will have contact information of the young voters you talked to for GOTV.
4. Make a Voter Guide. We all get busy and can’t keep up with the candidates and ballot initiatives that are happening on Election Day. Make it easy for young voters and create a voter guide that lists who/what to vote for and why. Leave the voter guides at places like coffee shops, college cafeterias and people’s door steps. You can also hand them out as people are headed home from work and school in heavy trafficked areas like bus stops, metro centers, schools and supermarkets.
5. Throw a Party at the Polls. Why not make polling locations fun. Bring food, music, signs, candidate lit, balloons, just about anything to make it fun and welcoming. We forget that voting can at times be intimidating. Placing volunteers at polls, especially those that are populated with a lot of young people, and making the atmosphere fun can increase the likelihood of a young voter stopping and going in to vote.

Above all else, keep young people on your GOTV call and walk list.

Resources get tight in the last days of an election, but the biggest mistake your campaign will make is to cut young people from your GOTV lists. Campaigns usually cut young voters because they have no vote history or they don’t have the frequency of voting as older voters. Think in terms of a young voter—this may be their first eligible election so of course they have no vote history...yet! Go against the grain and leave young voters on your lists.

When trying to get young people to the polls, you must throw out the conventional wisdom of “young people don’t vote.” Young people don’t vote at the same rate as older voters  because they are not targeted. Talk to young voters and they will vote. Having other young people and the candidate do the asking and information giving is even better. Don’t attempt to do all of the above in the last week of the election, but at least try one of the activities. Your volunteers and fellow staffers will get a refreshing break from other campaign activities and your candidate just might win because of the youth vote in the process.

Want More?
In addition to the organizations linked to above, check out the Pink Bunnies project by Forward Montana and creative ads by New Era Colorado. Both are innovative state-based organizations targeting young voters.

For links to research and case studies visit www.youngvoterpac.org
or go right to www.rockthevote.com/research/ and download “Young Voter Mobilization Tactics I and II.” All of the guides on Rock the Vote’s site highlight best practices and research by respected young voter researchers and pollsters including Celinda Lake, David Nickerson, Donald Green and Alan Gerber.

Since when did it become the thing to do to hate on young people? This week the NYTimes has posted three articles the first saying we are meaningless non-voters the second Criticizing us for "delaying" things like marriage and permanent employment... And finally today's saying we're doing our civic duty but we're doing it all wrong because its too quite.

Generation FU needs to get off our backs.

Thomas Friedman begins today's piece all about exploring colleges and how confused he is.

"The Iraq war may be a mess, but I noticed at Auburn and Old Miss more than a few young men and women proudly wearing their R.O.T.C. uniforms. Many of those not going abroad have channeled their national service impulses into increasingly popular programs at home like “Teach for America,” which has become to this generation what the Peace Corps was to mine.

It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.

But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention. And we’ll just keep piling it on them."

Why are these things all our burden? Why is it that the mistakes of Generation FU (aka 40+) suddenly require us to rise up and blow things up like some kind of psycho. I don't want to get tortured by Dick Cheney do you?

So we look at what is practical - what works, what will become a longterm investment in our future. I don't need to point out that we hold absolutely no cards at this stage in the game. We do not have representation to the youth in the White House, the closest person to our age in the US Senate is 40, and the 30 something Caucus has a hand full of people in it who I've never seen talk to us about ways to work together....

Wouldn't it be a smarter means of rebellion to create lasting, meaningful, revolution that is embedded into the culture rather than a short term hell raising weekend that just energizes our opposition and creates another counter-culture yuppy movement in our history??

As Mike Connery just said to me

"doesn't it make more sense for us to work towards gaining that power as quickly as possible rather than wasting our time in useless gestures and symbolism?"

A few weeks ago the winner was announced in an essay contest run by the New York Times. The winner was responding to an essay by Rick Perlstein called "What's the Matter with College," another anti-youth piece run that made the argument that young people need to rise up.

The winner, Nicholas Handler, says

"On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning–a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt."

As Mike Connery said so eloquently in an email to me - there is activism out there - it just takes on different forms.

"Al Gore and Friedman want us standing in front of bulldozers, but what does that accomplish? Protest is pretty dead as a viable form of activism. We're working within the system to change it. "

Friedman is quick to smackdown the internet as a "too quiet" form of revolution and goes on to say:

"Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual."

You can see just how old fashioned Mr. Friedman himself is. I didn't find Thomas Friedman on facebook. But I did find a special group called "Thomas Friedman: Bigoted Fool" that I joined right away... you know, to show my activism.

Mike says "the accomplishments of the blogosphere aren't symbolic, and FaceBook can be a valuable recruiting tool for youth nonprofit organizations that do real work. All of that builds power for young people in our public debate, and all of this is in addition to (not in place of), the work we are doing to build careers where we can push for socially responsible business."

If you further examine some of the sites we quote on here such as the National Conference on Citizenship Report (NcoC) with CIRCLE and Saguaro Seminar (Harvard). (page 17) that discusses "netizens," which are citizens are active online, you'll find further refutation to Friedman's thesis:

"Contrary to predictions that the Internet might replace face-to-face participation, the survey finds no trade off. In fact, the netizens are much more likely than other people to attend public meetings in which there was discussion of community affairs (38 percent versus 23 percent), attend a club meeting (72 percent versus 47 percent) or take part in a protest or demonstration (31 percent versus 15 percent)."

My assumption is that these Generation FU writers are too disconnected, too out of touch, and too old to recognize progress, rebellion, and meaningful action even with their bifocal lenses. Perhaps they should spend time talking to their kids about websites rather than having us just fix their computers the same way they want us to fix the society they screwed up. Perhaps they should spend more time talking to us about what we are doing rather than assuming it isn't well thought, well planned, or well organized before they pass judgment based clearly on ignorance.

Handler's piece ends as a well worded response to Friedman by saying

"College as America once knew it–as an incubator of radical social change– is coming to an end. To our generation the word ‘radicalism’ evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. ‘Campus takeover’ sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s– it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words."

Ever since 2004, those of us who have been involved in youth outreach have been annoyed, to put it mildly, by the constant parroting of the lie that young people are apathetic, and that they will not vote. No matter how many studies came out, no matter how many experts debunk this myth, and despite the fact that the last two elections showed a pretty significant upswing in young voters, the media seemed determined to parrot talking points that claimed that young people were not worth doing outreach towards, and many campaigns seemed to go right along. Well, it looks like we may finally have turned the corner in regards to this meme, as Time Magazine featured an article last week titled Reaching Out Early for the Youth Vote.

Even in a presidential campaign that has started as early as this one, Heather Smith couldn't have expected she would already be so busy. But "my phone started ringing the day after midterms and it hasn't stopped ringing since," says Smith, 30, the executive director of Young Voter Strategies (YVS). Her non-partisan organization, which she founded after the 2004 election with funding help from Pew and George Washington University, analyzes how to best mobilize young voters. That section of the electorate has traditionally been treated as an afterthought until weeks before the actual voting. But this time around top presidential contenders and political strategists are starting to focus early on the youth vote.
...
Smith's tips could be more important than ever in 2008. After more than a decade of declining or stagnating numbers, turnout among voters under age 30 increased by almost 5 million in 2004 and almost 2 million in 2006. Voting experts say this is because a new generation has come of age — the Millienials — and they are more civically engaged young adults than so-called GenXers were during the 1990s. The Millenial Generation — those born between 1979 and 1994 — is also three times the size of Generation X. They've voted Democratic in the last two elections and according to a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll released in late June, they plan to again in 2008. That poll found that 54% of voters under age 30 say they intend to vote Democratic. But 40% of young adults ages 18 to 24 describe themselves as Independents, according to an April poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics. Because of that, Smith says Republicans could still win the youth vote in 2008.

Welcome to the real world, Time Magazine! I hope you enjoy your stay!

I guess my only real question at this point is: why haven't our phones been ringing off the hooks?

My only question in regards to the article has to do with this quote:

"Nobody in either party thinks that the youth vote is not worth paying serious attention to and spending money on programs to get them registered and turned out."

Really? I mean, I know that there are a few good progressive groups out there giving pretty heavily to youth outreach programs, but the Democratic Party seems pretty incapable of reaching out to a younger audience. But hell, maybe they've turned that corner too.

In about five minutes I'm jumping in a car and heading down to DC to attend the Take Back America 2007 Conference. I'm going to try and do one or two "live-blogs" from there, though that will depend a bit on getting some free time. Either way, if you're reading this, and you're attending the conference and would like to meet up, let me know in comments. If you're in DC, but not planning on going to the conference, you should still come out to the Drinking/Living Liberally parties. There's one on both Monday and Tuesday night.

Update 1: I'm heading to a panel on youth voting right now. I'll see how it goes.

Update 2: Fred and I have added some comments on the conference below.

Update 3 (by mike): Here's our own Alex UA talking to the Dodd campaign about student loan transparency and reaching out to young voters: