When the time finally comes and teens have the power to vote for the first time in 18 years, they do not. The Youth of Canada do not take full advantage of voting or having a say in politics at all. However, who is to blame. Even through social media,
Voting in Canada is more important now than ever. At the last federal election on October 19th 2015, there was an overall voter turnout of 68.3%. This was the highest voter turnout Canada had seen at a federal election in two decades. Out of 35,85 million people in Canada, 3,6 million people casted their ballots. However, with the overall increase of people that showed up to this election, the number of young people, especially those aged 18-24 that attended, was at an all time low. This has created a great deal of concern for when these people get to be older and more younger people will be eligible to vote, if there will be anybody in Canada who are still voting with interest and not just abstaining to. It’s important that the most amount of people in Canada vote as possible so that our government is solely represented by people who Canadians agree with their political statements and beliefs. There’s no point in the country being run by people and parties who Canadians don’t agree with because their main job as representants of the country is to voice the beliefs and concerns of those Canadians. It’s important for Canadians to be encouraged to vote young because it is the first years of being legal age to vote that are uninterested in doing so.
The message emerging from a recent research series on youth civic and political participation is clear: today's youth are not disjoined from associational and small political life, but they are increasingly disenchanted with formal political institutions and practices. Children and youth under 18 have made sententious strides in recent years toward fuller involvement in democratic processes. These strides,
Political inactivity on the part of young Americans stems from one fundamental source -- a general cynicism of the American political process. This disdain for politics is further perpetuated by a lack of voter education and a needlessly archaic voting procedure that creates barriers to voting where they need not exist. While many of these existing problems can be rectified with relative ease through the implementation of programs such as Internet voting and better voter education, such programs create only a partial solution.
1. Only 21 percent of the voting eligible population in 2014 were young adults ages 18-29 (“why student voters matter”, 2016).
Since 1972, youth voter turnout has been on the decline. According to the Child Trends Databank, 50 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 participated in the 1972 presidential election (2015). Nearly three decades later, the percentage of young adults aged 18 to 24 who voted in the 2000 presidential election had dropped eighteen
Political Science 298 Book Review November 6th, 2012 Danny Fitzpatrick Is Voting For Young People? The main point according Martin P. Wattenberg in Is Voting For Young People is that young people today do not vote during elections as much compared to other voting groups. Young people today are politically unengaged. “These state patterns of voting participation can be confirmed on the national level by the Census Bureau’s 2010 survey data. Among U.S. citizens under the age of 30 in 2010, only 24 percent reported that they voted.” (Page-188, IVYP) The low attendance of young people voting in Presidential elections indicates that young people do not care enough about politics to participate.
Several previous polls have proven that younger voters tend to vote dramatically less than older voters. The article also sudgests we allow 16 year old voters to take voting impact away from that of much older voters. When in reality the older voters have much more life experience and could make a better, more well founded decision than that of a 16 year
The Decline of Young Canadian Voters In Margaret Adsett’s article on young voters in Canada, she discusses the growing problem of low youth involvement in politics. In the paper, she tries to explain why the number of young voters has gone down from 70 per cent to 40 per cent between 1970 and 2000.
In the article “Takoma Park 16-year-old Savors his History-Making Moment at the Polls,” written by Annys Shin, the author focuses on whether or not lowering the voting age from 18 is a good idea towards politics, by looking at the benefits and the disadvantages of both sides. In 2013, the city of Takoma Park was the first to lower the voting age to 16 and change the 26th Amendment in their municipal. Ben Miller and other 16- and 17-year-olds were capable of stepping into a booth and casting their vote at the Takoma Park Community Center. Allowing this age group to cast a vote will lead more teenagers to vote than their older peers, it will get them into the habit of voting for the rest of their lives, and it will also increase their personal
Voting has not always been as easy as it is today. It is interesting to examine how far America has progressed in its process of allowing different types of people to be able to vote. Voting was once aimed at a particular group of people, which were white males that owned their own property. Today, most people over the age of eighteen can vote, except for the mentally incompetent or people who have been convicted of major felonies in some states. The decline of voter participation has always been a debate in the public arena. According to McDonald and Popkin, it is “the most important, most familiar, most analyzed, and most conjectured trend in recent American political history (2001, 963)” The question is, how important is voter
The newest generation, also known as the Millennials, has sparked one of the latest topics of debate and that is voting. Recent examples of young voters excelling political candidates have occurred with Bernie Sanders and even helped bring Barrack Obama into the presidency. These articles by The New York Times delve into the underlying cause of the low turnout rates. Most of these articles place the blame for low voter turnouts on colleges. Colleges are not to blame for these turnouts as they don’t discourage political thinking.
It seems as though the younger population of voters have all grown up in a world where they have been influenced to believe that their one vote will not make a difference, and therefore they do not bother to take the time out of their busy schedules to cast their meaningless vote. In the last presidential election, only one out of four citizens between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four casted their vote (“Is the System broken?”). The opinion that one vote will not make a difference appears to be directly respondent to the younger generation of voters. This generation needs to be educated on the difference that one vote can make.
Young Americans Must Vote! Why vote? This is a major question among many young Americans today. America's youth, does not take the time to read articles, observe the news, or pay attention to presidential debates and campaigns due to their busy schedules. This creates two problems. First, young voters have little knowledge of current issues in the election. Also as a result, they are unaware of the importance of voting. Each presidential election stirs up an old controversy of whether to vote or not to vote. There are many young people who think that voting is not important; I believe that it is. By voting you are exercising your right as an American to voice your opinion, and young Americans need to become aware of this.
Cavins 1 Throughout the history of America young people have always played a crucial role in politics. The famous writer Srirangam Srinivas wrote, “Our country is not in the hands of lazy and corrupted old politicians, this country is ours i.e. youth”. Young people between the ages 18 to 25 are