This year, about 4 million Americans will turn 18, just in time to vote in November’s midterms.
However, fewer than 30 percent of newly eligible young voters are currently registered to vote—half the number of students who go to college—and that percentage is only going down.
In 2024, by comparison, 44 percent of U.S. 18-year-olds were registered, compared to approximately 75 percent over voters aged 45 and up.
For midterm elections in particular, not much more than a quarter of eligible 18-year-olds vote—meaning about 2 million young people are missing the chance to let their voices be heard.
A common refrain is that Gen Z isn’t interested in voting or politics, but the data doesn’t back this up. According to research from The Civics Center, among 18-year-olds who are registered, voter turnout is high. More than 75 percent of registered young voters 18 through 24 have turned out to vote in every presidential election going back to 2004—suggesting the issue isn’t with young voters themselves but how they’re (not) being registered.
“Young people are told so frequently, ‘Your vote doesn’t matter, what you say doesn’t matter,’” Laura Brill, The Civics Center’s founder and CEO, told Ms. “And these things have a negative impact, because actually young people probably do know that they matter, and we don’t want to have a future where people are just feeling cynical and as if they’re intentionally being left out of the process.”
Barriers to Access
If the 18-24 age group wants to be included, then why aren’t more of them registered to vote?
There are a number of reasons, ranging from outdated registration processes to recent legal efforts that actively hinder young people’s opportunities to register.
One major shift of the last several years is that teenagers are learning to drive and getting their licenses later than was common in years past. (High school is harder than it used to be, and many teenagers say they’re simply too busy.) According to the Federal Highway Administration, fewer than 40 percent of teenagers 16–19 had their licenses in 2021, compared to 64 percent in 1995, and that number only continues to decrease.
As a result, fewer teenagers are registering with the DMV, which used to be the primary way people registered to vote for the first time, thanks to 1993’s Motor Voter Act, which made state DMVs the main voter registration agencies.
Many states’ online voter registration systems require a driver’s license or other form of state ID, which teenagers likely won’t have if they haven’t learned to drive yet. “All this non-driving is blocking out millions of young people,” Brill says.
If the last few decades’ trend continues and teenagers learn to drive later at lower rates, states will need to adapt—but registering to vote via the DMV remains the most common route for many people, even if it’s becoming less accessible.
In response, some youth voting rights advocates have suggested that states allow high schoolers to use their student IDs as a form of acceptable documentation for voter registration. After all, when parents enroll their kids in school, much of the information they provide (home address, etc.) is the same information you need to apply for a driver’s license or other state ID.
However, using student IDs for voting has proven controversial in the past. A handful of states expressly forbid student IDs as a valid form of identification, while others allow student IDs only if they meet certain requirements. Many states with ID requirements also require that IDs, including student IDs, be current and unexpired, which makes sense in principle but can leave recent graduates in a lurch if their high school or college ID no longer works for voting but they don’t yet have a driver’s license.
In many states, young people can pre-register to vote as early as 16 (or 15 in Colorado), giving them the option to register well in advance before their first election rolls around after they turn 18.
However, just because teenagers have the option to pre-register doesn’t mean that most of them are doing it.
“Pre-registration is relatively new, and also just very unknown,” Brill says. “Most people, when you ask them how old you have to be to register to vote, they just think it’s 18.”
Due to lacking and uneven civics education in the U.S., many people don’t know they have to register at all in order to vote. (After Taylor Swift posted an Instagram PSA in October 2024, Vote.gov received nearly 406,000 visitors in the first 24 hours.)
Some states have legislation in place to help students preregister through their high schools, but these efforts don’t always lead to noticeable change. California, for instance, requires public schools to designate a teacher or staff member in charge of distributing voter registration forms, but there hasn’t been a robust effort to provide real instruction and opportunity for students to register on campus. Currently, fewer than 50 percent of 18-year-olds in California are registered to vote, and this is an important year for state-level elections since Californians will elect a new governor and U.S. House seats in November.
Possible Solutions
While 40 percent of U.S. 18-year-olds don’t go off to college, nearly everyone goes to high school, making high schools one of the most democratic, widely accessible public institutions we have.
Even though most U.S. teenagers can register to vote before 18, many high schoolers don’t learn about pre-registering in school unless they have a particularly dedicated AP Government or health and life skills teacher. Without that information coming from an official channel, extracurricular groups or community organizations can make a difference by getting the word out about how teenagers can preregister to vote.
Brill shared a story about a group of students in Claremont, Calif.—which had the lowest preregistration rate of any school district in Los Angeles County—went classroom to classroom with a presentation and registered more than 700 students at their high school. From that one effort, the Claremont school district became one of the top 15 percent in L.A. for young voter registration. This kind of peer-led information sharing can have a huge impact on students who may not otherwise know they can register to vote before they turn 18.
A perfect system might involve people automatically being registered to vote by the time they turn 18. Some countries including Germany and South Korea automatically register every eligible voter, as Brill recently wrote for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. While such wide systemic change seems like a long way off for the U.S., increasing awareness and opportunities for high schoolers to register to vote is an important step we can take right now to register as many 18-year-olds as possible before this November’s midterms.
Brill’s organization The Civics Center and other groups such as the League of Women Voters work to expand voter education and help high school students register their peers to vote with nonpartisan voter registration drives.
On The Civics Center’s website, students and educators can sign up for a one-hour remote workshop available to people all over the country to help them facilitate voter drives.
The Civics Center also hosts a fall campaign called High School Voter Registration Week and sends out “Democracy in a Box” toolkits with T-shirts, stickers and pens to help students run drives in their schools.
“I think it starts with realizing that the job isn’t getting done on its own,” Brill says. “A lot of it starts with helping people understand where we’re at now, how low the numbers are, and that they actually can get involved and help.”
Independent studies have shown these drives can increase voter registration rates by 6 percentage points in the areas that have them, while being a deeply meaningful learning tool for the students involved who get to empower people their age to become more civically engaged. Meanwhile, having the ability to vote and feel represented in government can have a ripple effect across all areas of students’ lives. Especially since young students so frequently feel like they don’t have a voice, registering to vote gives them a chance to feel like they have the power to make a difference in their communities and their own lives.
“We know that there’s a massive mental health crisis facing young people—all parents know it, and all teens know it and everybody who works in school settings knows it,” says Brill. “If young people were registered at the same rates and weren’t massively underrepresented, they would have a better opportunity to be in dialogue with candidates and campaigns and elected officials to explain what their concerns are. The premise of democracy is we’re going to come to better decisions when we’re all involved … We’re just not making as good future-oriented decisions as we might if all young people were registered.”
