According to a study conducted by the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement in August 2017 sixty-one percent of Youngstown State University students voted in the 2016 presidential election. This is up from 57.9 percent in the 2012 presidential election.
The study found that 82.6 percent of YSU students were registered to vote in 2016, with the voting rate of registered students at 73.8 percent.
But this percentage is still not enough.
As Jerry Springer expressed in an exclusive interview with The Jambar, “You’ve got to get out there and vote, or don’t be standing up in the seventh-inning stretch and singing ‘God Bless America.’”
He is exactly right. There is no point in protesting or even complaining about the political atmosphere if you do not participate in elections.
Voting is simple, and if you have a difficult time getting to the polls, just get an absentee ballot.
Some students say that their vote doesn’t matter, but it does. Overall, ignorance is bliss, until it catches up to you. America’s issues affect everyone. If not now, it will in the future.
According to data estimates released by the United States Census Bureau in June 2015, millennials born between 1982 and 2000 represent one quarter of the nation’s population at 83.1 million.
The generation’s size exceeds the 75.4 million baby boomers. This means millennials can out-vote them and create the change they want.
Change will not happen if ballots are not cast.
The right to vote is guaranteed to citizens of America, and as citizens we must recognize this act as a civic duty. Freedom, unless exercised, dies. We mustn’t take for granted this noble opportunity.
Women and minorities had to fight for the right to vote and because you have that right, do not take it for granted.
One dilemma our generation faces is the overwhelming plethora of non-sequitur of news thrown in our faces. The continuity of talking heads misleading voters, and affecting the ill-informed may easily force them to stray away from journeying to the polls.
The rules are made by those who show up. You may not take an interest in politics, but politics will most assuredly take an interest in you.
