Hw many high school students are eligible to vote?

[shockey80]

The republicans were already in trouble in the upcoming election. These students are all going to vote against the republicans. They can make things even tougher for the republicans.

At the very least, the NRA and the Republicans are creating a future generation of people who will be against their extremism on guns. The tide is turning.

Extremism always boomerangs.

[tavernier]

1. Thats the hope!!

My grandson is a sophomore and he will be old enough in the next presidential election, as will the majority of high schoolers. Many seniors will be 18 by this year. Yes, the NRA realizes this very well, so they won’t stop to make that generation demonized.

[tonyt53]

2. Be 18 and registered to vote.

[jberryhill]

3. Young people don't vote

And while that is often attributed to laziness, apathy, or whatever, the real reasons why young people don't vote are more complicated and structural. Top of the list are that young people move around a lot.

I've been listening to this "the youth vote is going to change things" song and dance since the 60's. Bottom line: it never happens.

Take these particular high school kids for example. They are from relatively well-off families, and many of them are going to be going away to college in late August / early September. They will mostly be ineligible to vote in wherever they move to, since many places have registration deadlines and residency requirements which are not going to permit someone who moved there in September to vote in November. So, in order to vote, they would have to get an absentee ballot through whatever procedures their home jurisdiction provides. Their home jurisdiction may or may not consider them a resident, because they have moved away.

Many young people live in a kind of "permanent residence limbo" - renting places with various roommates in arrangements that aren't particularly settled, while using their residence address for some purposes and one of their parents' addresses (many parents are divorced) for other purposes.

On top of that, many voting regulations are intentionally designed to make it difficult for people with the type of mobility and transience that is typical of young people to actually get registered and vote. A typical Catch-22 are situations in which the young person's home district does not consider them a resident if they have moved away to college, and their college district does not consider them a resident if they are just there for college.

Take a small college town like Newark, Delaware. It has a population of 33,000. It is home to the University of Delaware with a student body of 20,000, the majority of whom are from out of state. The types of residence restrictions built into voting systems is designed to prevent those 20,000 persons with generally no fixed interest in how the town is run from preventing thousands of essentially temporary residents from taking over the local government.

There are some 17 million young people in college alone, and the problems they have voting are significant:

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/college-game-plan/voting-hurdles-often-keep-college-students-away-ballot-box-n637046

But for many, this isn’t because of voter apathy, but rather the hassle involved with registering to vote and casting their ballot while in college. They face hurdles including proof of residency, absentee ballot use and voter identification. These issues tend to disproportionately affect college students because so many students travel out of state for college.