Election officials in Iowa are upping their efforts to increase political participation among the state’s youngest voters.
A registration event has netted thousands of new voters – who are teens. Iowa law requires high schools to conduct two annual voter registration drives to educate students. This year, Secretary of State Paul Pate set aside a single day to turn the education into action, and get eligible high school students registered. In Iowa, 17-year-olds who will be 18 by November of an election year can vote in primaries, and Pate travels the state to teach kids how government affects them…
Pate says 45-hundred 17-year-olds are registered to vote due to the efforts. That’s 11-hundred more than were registered six months ago.
Pate says often, getting students registered to vote is the hard part. Once they’re signed up, they need to learn about the issues – and that happens in ways new and old…
In another effort to encourage participation, Iowa held a straw poll for teens just before the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses last month. Six-thousand students cast ballots.
(credit to Iowa News Service)
