Every year, Jessie Cai would shadow her mother and “take your child to work”. At the Social Security office in Maryland, where his mother was a systems analyst, he was struck by the lack of Asian American faces in the room. “I walked around and got the distinct impression that a lot of people working in the civil service are not like me or my mother,” said Cai, a rising 17-year-old.
This experience set him on a mission to understand the civic engagement of Asian Americans. In 2023, he joined New Votersan organization that helps high school students register to vote. Then, with the Maryland primary on the horizon, he wanted to make sure the voices of young people, including Asian Americans in his community, were heard. “In Maryland, you can pre-register to vote at 16, so I knew we could cast a wider net to register younger students,” she said.
New Voters paired Cai with a mentor who provided step-by-step instructions for hosting a sign-up drive. Cai set up meetings with school administrators, convinced her statistics teacher to sponsor her club, and partnered with the National Social Studies Honor Society to create a week-long initiative in April. He and friends sat at a table outside the cafeteria, where they handed out donuts to students who came to learn more about voting.
In the end, he managed to register 186 students. “We drove home the point that voting is the best way to hold people in power accountable,” he said. “We reminded them that we take our right to vote for granted. This is a privilege that other teenagers in the world sometimes don’t get.”
That’s how New Voters, a non-military nonprofit organization, works – connecting high school students with a passion for civic engagement to the resources they need to empower their peers. Founder Jahnavi Rao, 24, registered 85% of voters at her high school in 2017 as a senior. Soon, high school students across the country were reaching out to him asking how they could do the same.
Since 2018, the organization has registered more than 80,000 high school students to vote at 400 high schools in 39 states. Every election, the organization builds on itself — New Voters has worked with more than 2,000 high school student drive leaders and volunteers, who then continue to mentor new recruits.
“We are a youth-led, issue-led organization,” Rao said. “When talking to students, we always ask, ‘What are you interested in?’ This is the best practice to do research on the whole because young people care a lot. It’s just a matter of connecting this concern to voting.”
Amplifying high school voices in politics
In the 2022 midterm elections, 12% of ballots taken by young people between the ages of 18 and 29, although they make up approx 18% of voters.
But these were the numbers tends upwards in recent years. Gen Z voters, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University appeared at a higher rate than previous generations during the first midterm elections in 2022. 51 percent of voters are of age Voting is expected on November 18-24.
A way to keep busy 8 million This year, the young people who have the new right to vote are to address the issues they are in more likely to care on: the climate crisis, gun violence and racism, Rao said.
Another key factor in youth voter turnout is ease of access to the ballot box. states that reduced barriers to voting had higher voting rates in 2022 by allowing same-day voter registration and documenting student IDs.
Michael Hanmer, professor of government and politics, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Affairs at the University of Maryland, noted that 39% of high school graduates don’t go on to college. He emphasized the advantages of enrolling students in secondary school as soon as they reach the age limit. “Disruptions in life after high school can make enrollment difficult,” he said. “If you create habits of civic engagement earlier when students are in their communities, voting is more likely to stick.”
Hanmer believes that voting is based on culture, and that school administrators, teachers and students can participate in building a positive voting culture. “Schools as an institution can play a big role in promoting civic engagement by working with organizations like New Voters, which train students to build cultural roots and pass on their skills to incoming students,” she said.
Collin Wang, Cai’s mentor, hosted five drives to sign up more than 300 students at his high school in Wexford, Pennsylvania, before becoming a New Voters mentor. She says one of the biggest challenges her teachers face is convincing school administrators to join the drives. Some directors were not interested in providing voting lists; others hesitated to be accused of partisanship. In those cases, Wang and New Voters provided message templates explaining the nonpartisan nature of their work and state law. given a mandate voter registration drives are held in high schools. Finally, the administrators came.
While Wang offers guidance to her mentees, she also allows students to adapt their approach to enrolling their peers. “We want to give students independence because every school is different,” Wang said. “Students know what strategies will work best in their schools.”
Building a coalition around high school civic engagement
Over the past year, New Voters’ work has expanded beyond school drives. In early 2022, the organization launched the New Voters Research Network, which matches high school students with university and nonprofit researchers and trains them to develop research on civic engagement. “When students present their projects to professors, they are amazed at the impact and quality of research that high school students can produce,” said Sidney Fahn, director of the initiative. Currently, the network is working on many research projects.
For his project, Wang reached out to all 600 Pennsylvania public high school principals to analyze which messages had the most traction. Although his team is still awaiting results, Wang is confident that the research network will fill an important knowledge gap. “There is no information about the potential for civic engagement in high school,” he said. “Hopefully, all of these findings can lead to policy changes in the future.”
After establishing his research network, Rao turned his attention to the November elections. In February 2023, he organized a virtual listening tour of 40 organizations in a high school setting—among other voter-focused initiatives My School Votes Asking general youth nonprofits—like the YMCA and Scouting America—if they participate in voter registration efforts. He found two common themes among the groups: first, there was not enough information about how to increase voter registration, and second, there was not enough collaboration between high school service organizations. “I had an idea — what if we could bring everyone who works with high school students, whether it’s state, county, national or issue-based, around the table to share best practices and build trust?” Rao said.
This led to the band’s latest project New Voters Cooperation Organization, brings together 30 high school service organizations for monthly meetings to discuss issues such as promoting voting in high school civics classes and writing comments to local newspapers. “We’re mapping out where each organization is working, where there are gaps, and which schools need resources,” she said. “The main goal of the cooperation is to support voter registration in every secondary school in the country.”
With the general election approaching, New Voters is targeting 400 drivers and 40,000 new registrations in Pennsylvania and Arizona. Katie Walters, a high school government teacher in Pennsylvania and New Voters faculty advisor, said her students began strategizing earlier this spring, preparing tables during graduation exercises and planning class visits in the fall. “We have students go into every classroom and explain how to sign up,” Walters said. “Student-to-student interaction is key.”