If you want to fix voting for the younger generation the barriers to actually vote need to be lessened if not removed.
Every year more than 1M people default on their student loans, ruining their credit and essentially their lives.
Currently this is a voting block of 8M people and it will continue to grow by 1M every year. There is one candidate who has promised to forgive all student loans, and yet the person won't garner anywhere close to 8M votes.
There is a coordinated effort to indebt young people with loans they will spend the next 40-50 years of their life paying. Their degrees won't even pay for themselves as evidence by the fact these young people who historically could at least move out and begin their lives are no longer able to afford to do so...and when these issues are mentioned people are silenced (or downvoted into the grey so their comments can't be read).
There is more to this than young people don't vote, especially where they have every reason.
However, 8 Million is the potential voting block of people who have already defaulted on their student loans...there are a total of 44.7 Million people with student loans who all would be interested and benefit from loan forgiveness/abatement. To put those numbers in perspective it it just exceeds the number of elderly voters on Medicare (44 Million).
Also, if you live on a red state vote for a moderate. Try to influence the primaries.
Traditionally older people tend to have (or have had) more set schedules/defined work hours, more benefits (paid time off), and better job security in general. I'm not saying it's impossible for kids today to vote, but there are some disturbing trends in employment and the way workers are treated that I can see making it harder than it's been for previous generations.
Previous generations were able to support themselves at least enough to move out of their parent's homes. Young adults today are clearly struggling in ways that past generations haven't had to and that's going to strain how much time and effort they can spend on local and state politics.
Of course none of that addresses the larger issues like voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering which limit the impact of voters making the effort seem less worthwhile.
I still think young people should do everything the can to get involved and vote, but I'm not going to pretend that any mention of their struggles can be dismissed by calling them "whiny entitled people"
Did I have "a lot going on"? Sure. Do I have utter faith in "The Government" and//or "The Voting Process"? Not really.
But I still vote. It's my right and also, as I've come to see it, my duty. Free speech or no, I believe that if I want to complain about an election and be taken seriously I should participate in it at at least the bare minimal active level.
I've always made time to vote, and at least read the voter's pamphlet if not also further sources to attempt to make that vote an informed one.
Asking for a thesaurus.
I find this a very questionable statement. Most middle age people are working 40+ hours, on top of devoting hours to kids, maintenance etc. They are every bit as busy as young people, if not more so.
Politicians respond to only 2 things, votes and lobbyist dollars. If people want to make a change and have politicians stop ignoring them then they need to establish themselves as a reliable voting block. Until they do this they are just shouting into the wind / twitter / reddit / facebook.
Voting by absentee ballot takes minutes, everyone who want to has time for that.
Since moving to California after that, I've voted by mail as much as possible, and I literally live right next door to my polling station; I see it and their parking spots right out my bedrooms' windows every day.
Seniors have time but have trouble getting to the pols.
Middle age - Are working/picking up kids but still find time.
I think younger people see through the effectiveness of voting. If I do vote my vote seems to really not matter. If all young people vote as a block maybe an issue will be mentioned or moved towards something I like. But the effort / reward doesn't add up when the election is decided in the mid-west and the election is called before my vote is even records as a California resident.
It seems crazy that you are given two choices that basically blame each for everything gone wrong or take credit for everything positive but do the same thing when given the chance.
Liking a photo is so much more rewarding and feels like more of a direct impact.
As long as young people keep thinking like that, and old people don't, old people will keep winning elections.
> If all young people vote as a block maybe an issue will be mentioned or moved towards something I like. But the effort / reward doesn't add up when the election is decided in the mid-west and the election is called before my vote is even records as a California resident.
State and local elections matter too.
Voting is not economically rational if it takes more than zero time, given those odds.
When so many people beat the drum of economic rationality, is it a surprise people don't vote? At most one of "economic rationality is valid" or "you should vote" is a true statement. When we're told that the former is true, we're being told not to vote.
There are modifications of "rationality" that actually provide a justification for voting. But you'll never see an economist acknowledge that superrationality is a thing, for instance.
So if you aren't the one, single deciding vote it's not worthwhile? That's an immature approach. All the more immature because you go on to couch it in rhetoric about economics and "rationality" that amounts to nothing more than third rate sophistry.
You're not a taxi cab that has to be in service 24 hours a day to maximize utilization. You're a person with responsibilities. Your "economic rationality" is just a lazy justification for only doing what you feel like doing ("provides marginal value!") and never doing anything you don't.
If you're going to be a bum, be honest with yourself and those around you.
Is a thing only worth doing if you can cast yourself as the lone hero who turned the tide?
This seems like the Tragedy of the Commons. You fish in a stream, because why not? One person can never eat enough fish to make a dent in the population. Then a thousand of your neighbors fish the same stream. Soon it's completely depopulated, and there are no more fish for anyone, and everyone involved can still say "it wasn't my fault, my impact was barely noticeable."
Either it's nobody's fault, just a totally unavoidable act of God, or it's everybody's fault, and you all should have worked together to address it. Only one of those ways of thinking will get anything done.
In one of those elections, my preferred candidate won by a mere 129 votes out of 2.8 million votes cast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...
If you don't vote, you won't be able to tell if your vote "really mattered" in an election until it's too late to do anything.