| OCR Text |
Show have the ability to travel there. In addition, what documents are needed in order to vote are not always clear leading up to Election Day. Specifically, students are impacted more by these issues. Often times students live on campus, may not have a car, or have moved from different states where laws are different. These obstacles do not amount to voter repression but they do contribute to a larger trend that makes voting harder for millennials than for other voters. The second challenge is disenchantment that contributes to growing disengagement. Millennials don’t feel their voices are being heard nor do they think their votes matter. A new poll out from Tisch College’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE, “shows only 32 percent of millennials believe they ‘have a legitimate voice in the political process.’”4 At first glance it is easy to say this problem is clearly a cyclical one. Millennials do not vote because politics do not serve their interests, and politics do not serve their interests because millennials do not vote. One explanation for lower turnout is that Utah is so homogeneously conservative, races seem uncompetitive so voters just do not feel their votes can make a difference. Fighting for voter enfranchisement goes beyond my proposition to expand voter locations to college campuses. Ultimately, this system of voting in person is outdated. We are trying to force a generation that orders their meals on a mobile app to walk into a 19th century poll booth. The federal government must adapt to new technologies and to the generations that were born with those standards. The cyber security technology is there, but the political will to mobilize a generation that in its entirety is politically unpredictable is absent. I concede that promoting my project in launching old fashioned polling locations across college campuses is counterproductive to the call for an overhaul in the way we vote, but in policy it is always prudent to take one step at a time. 1 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/05/16/millennials-match-baby-boomers-as-largest-generation-in-u-s- electoratebut-will-they-vote/ 2 http://www.npr.org/2016/05/16/478237882/millennials-now-rival-boomers-as-a-political-force-but-will-they-actuallyvote 3 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hais-and-morley-winograd/its-official-millennials_b_144357.html 4 https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/11/01/the-power-millennialvoters/tytqvZAS39IW3xKqLLEibL/story.html |
