During this last week Grace and I have studied youth apathy in voting as well as nationwide statistics surrounding the youth vote. We also looked at the population, in general, of people who vote in America. There are 318.9 million people in the US, out of that huge number 218.9 million people are eligible to vote. Out of those eligible, 146.3 are actually registered, and even more astonishing: only 126.1 million people voted in the 2012 election. That horrified and scared me, almost 50% of our country isn’t or can’t participate in the democracy that we live in. I also looked at the apathy of youth and why they are seemingly uninterested in what it is these politicians and candidates have to offer. Among youth there’s a sense of frustration. The politicians are not platforming their campaign towards the youth. If the issues they talked about directly affected and were understandable to young college kids and young millennials starting out there adulthood, they’d be more apt to vote. However, the politicians have decided to platform to more reliable demographics and that is the older generation. There’s a negative stigma on youth, and youth tend to conform when that’s all they hear about themselves.
Grace and I did a lot of talking this week about what is feasible for us to accomplish in the amount of time we have. It was decided that we will not be holding an event. We will be doing voter registration drives, we will be creating informative pamphlets about voting and each of the candidates and we will be launching a social media campaign. We thought it would be best to do these things well rather than stuff in another deliverable. Last week, one of the La Plata Democratic campaign volunteers came in and certified both Grace and I, to be able to register others to vote. After talking with him we asked him to be our mentor, to which he said yes. His name is Darren White and he is highly qualified and very knowledgeable in this area. We will start the voter registration drives after spring break at Animas and then we will move to Durango High School and hopefully to Fort Lewis as well.
It’s been difficult to work without a clear end goal. This is such a huge problem across America, that it would be almost impossible to solve in 6 weeks. Unlike other projects we don’t have as tangible of an end result. I think this is a good lesson though, because not every project at a job or in the real world will have a huge end result or completely have solved something.
Our next step of action is to begin talking about our social media campaign and how that will be successful. In addition we will be creating the informative pamphlets over the next couple weeks.
Grace and I did a lot of talking this week about what is feasible for us to accomplish in the amount of time we have. It was decided that we will not be holding an event. We will be doing voter registration drives, we will be creating informative pamphlets about voting and each of the candidates and we will be launching a social media campaign. We thought it would be best to do these things well rather than stuff in another deliverable. Last week, one of the La Plata Democratic campaign volunteers came in and certified both Grace and I, to be able to register others to vote. After talking with him we asked him to be our mentor, to which he said yes. His name is Darren White and he is highly qualified and very knowledgeable in this area. We will start the voter registration drives after spring break at Animas and then we will move to Durango High School and hopefully to Fort Lewis as well.
It’s been difficult to work without a clear end goal. This is such a huge problem across America, that it would be almost impossible to solve in 6 weeks. Unlike other projects we don’t have as tangible of an end result. I think this is a good lesson though, because not every project at a job or in the real world will have a huge end result or completely have solved something.
Our next step of action is to begin talking about our social media campaign and how that will be successful. In addition we will be creating the informative pamphlets over the next couple weeks.
An article in The Atlantic I found.