Why don’t more young people vote?
We often hear how younger people are apathetic toward politics or politically disengaged. And while it’s true that they tend to vote at lower rates than older Americans, apathy is just one piece of the puzzle for young people — and maybe not even the most important piece.
According to our new survey with Ipsos of more than 8,000 Americans, people between 18 and 34 are less likely to have faith in our political system. But when we asked why they hadn’t voted in the past, we found that younger people weren’t more likely than older people to say they didn’t vote because they think the system is too broken to be fixed by voting, or because all the candidates are the same, or because they don’t believe in voting.
That cynicism doesn’t seem to be motivating them to sit on the sidelines during elections. Instead, younger people are much more likely than older people to report that they or members of their household have experienced barriers to voting, which suggests that they may genuinely find it more difficult to cast a ballot. And that problem could be compounded this year given the extraordinary challenges of voting during a pandemic.
In our survey, almost one-quarter (22 percent) of young people said that when they didn’t end up casting a ballot, they had actually wanted to but couldn’t. As the chart below shows, young people are more likely to report that they or members of their household have experienced hurdles to voting — even though most have had far fewer elections to vote in. Young people, for instance, are much more likely to say they couldn’t get off work to vote, didn’t receive their ballot in time, missed the registration deadline or had troub