Young (non)voters cede choices to the soon-to-be doddering and dead

Only about one in five registered 18- to-34 year-olds cast ballots in Aug. 6 Washington primary election

It was one of the more depressing reporting forays I’ve made in a long time. I stopped by Lower Columbia College the day after the Aug. 6 primary election to ask young people why so many of them didn’t vote.

Statewide, primary turnout among 18-24 year-old registered voters ended up at just 20.6% — just half of the overall statewide turnout (41.17%),  according to the Washington Secretary of State's Office. For the 25-34 year old range, turnout was just 21.8%. The numbers for Cowlitz County were slightly weaker.

By contrast, voter turnout in the 65+ range was 67% statewide and 64% locally. That's more than three times that of the 18-24 group.

Young people are letting old folks like me determine their futures, and I ventured off to the college to ask why.

The LCC campus was largely empty due to summer break, but I did encounter two non-students who were just walking through and one young Running Start student who was too young to vote.

One of older students, a 30-year-old man named Lulu, said he saw no reason to think his vote mattered and that there would be no point to if he were to be on the losing side. The 27-year-old with him said she understood that voting is important, but she said she was ineligible due to a criminal record. Neither knew an election had just taken place.

Ok, not a representative sample. But the statistics were bleak, too, especially considering that the primary ballot was filled with key races for governor, congress, county commissioner, state legislature and many other state executive offices.

This is not a new problem of course. According to The New York Times, fewer than half of Americans 18 to 29 voted in the 2016 presidential election — a gap of more than 15 points compared with the overall turnout. The problem is nearly universal around the world and has been for decades.

Many reasons are traditionally cited: Voting is a habit that young people have not yet acquired. They do not see a connection between the ballot box and their own well being and tax burden. Inflexible work schedules thwart registering and in-person voting. (That’s no excuse in Washington or Oregon, where all balloting is done by mail.) And some power elites seek to make voting more difficult, although those efforts are aimed more at minorities.

I’ll add a couple more to this list: Work force mobility decreases familiarity and engagement with new communities. The decline of local press coverage makes all voters less aware of candidates, issues and elections. And, finally, the ascendancy of science and technical studies has come at the expense of civic and liberal arts education.

The impact of low turnout rates is palpable and results in short-sighted policies. It helps explain why Social Security is headed for insolvency, why the effort to combat climate change is still too feeble to avert ecological and economic calamity, and why the U.S. keeps accumulating massive amounts of national debt.

Rekindling an interest in liberal arts education, making voting easier and emphasizing its importance to young people must be national and local priorities. And the right wing must stop denigrating election processes proven many times to be fair and transparent. Such unjustified talk undercuts faith in the system.

It’s easy to get turned off by politics — to tune out the duplicity, anger, double dealing and doublespeak, corruption and other pejoratives that often characterize the political scene. I get turned off, too.

Nevertheless, when depressed about all this I go back to an idea Plato expressed 2,400 years ago, an idea that keeps me writing this column well into retirement: “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

If you lack interest in the forces, people and institutions that shape your destiny, they will inevitably shape it for you. By not voting, young people are ceding their voice to people who will be dead or doddering by the time the full impact of present policies hits their lives.