3 Reasons to Vote

College students, are you going to vote today? You really should, experts say, for these reasons:

1. Young adult votes are woefully underrepresented.
2. Politicians take your grandparents’ votes more seriously because turnout in their age group is way higher.
3. You’ll get a cool sticker.

Even though Lubbock is a college town, young people’s votes make up a dreadfully small part of the ballots cast locally. Only 7.6 percent of all Lubbock votes in the 2014 general elections were cast by young adults between the ages of 18 and 29, show data from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

Other Texas college towns boasted similarly disastrous numbers. Only 7.6 percent of all Harris County votes were cast by young adults. In Dallas County, young adult votes accounted for 7.4 percent of all votes received. Tarrant County was a similar story at 7 percent.

Travis County did best, having 12 percent of all votes cast by young adults in the 2014 election.

To make matters worse, Texas has the third lowest rate of young adult voter turnout in the country. The state’s young adult voter turnout of 29.6 percent (meaning less than 30 percent of young people show up to vote) was statistically lower than the 45-percent national average in 2012 , according to the Census Bureau’s analysis on young adult voting.

The Office of Elections and Voter Registration in Lubbock. Nicole Crites/The Hub@TTU

The same analysis also indicated low-young-adult-turnout states were clustered in the South or the West.

Chance Lancarte from Fort Worth, who studied agricultural and applied economics at Tech, said he has never voted nor even registered to vote. He anticipates starting to vote later in life, when issues on the ballot become more likely to affect him personally.

Lancarte added he would be more inclined to vote in local rather than presidential elections.

“Voting in municipal elections would make more of a difference in your personal life than voting for the president,” he said. “Plus, since we live in Texas, our state will always be Republican for presidential elections. So either way I vote, it doesn’t really matter.”

Ricky Neville, a recent political science graduate who is now studying law at the University of Houston, said that although some people assume being in a major red state means election outcomes are predetermined, there are many local elections in which one’s vote really counts.

“While your one vote might not make a huge difference, if everyone thought that way, it would be very bad,” he said.

Neville added that voting is important because it affects every American citizen.

“I’m a strong believer that if you don’t vote, you shouldn’t complain about things,” he said. “I have complaints just like most people, but I can feel reassured that I did my part, but also, it’s just like a civic duty.”

Lancarte said a big reason he does not vote is because he feels uninformed about politics and has other priorities.

“We just have better things to do,” Lancarte said. “I don’t really care about that stuff. I would rather go hang out with my friends, and when I do, we usually aren’t talking about politics.”

Example of a voter’s registration license. Nicole Crites/ The Hub@TTU

Kathryn Kilgore, a Texas Tech alumna, said she is registered and has voted before but agrees politics are just not that important to young adults and college students.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, voting rates increase with age. Americans 65 and older typically have the highest turnout—72 percent in 2012.

Other voter turnout gaps emerge along the lines of gender and education.

In every presidential election since 1996, women 18 to 29 voted at higher rates than men in the same age group — a turnout difference that reached 8 percentage points in 2008, according to the Census Bureau’s analysis.

More education also means higher likelihood to vote. In 2012, the voting turnout among Texans with at least a bachelor’s degree was 70 percent, compared to 36 percent among high school dropouts, reported the Census Bureau. More than a third of Texans who did not complete high school are not even registered to vote.

Actually registering people to vote is more difficult than getting them registered, said Cole Adams, the former president of Tech College Democrats, who is now interning for Congressman Filemon Vela.

“At some point, there has got to be a watershed that says it’s cool to vote,” Adams said. “It happens every two years. It’s not that difficult. Just go vote.”