Voting According to recent statistics, America has among the lowest voter turnout of any democracy in the world based on participation in presidential and mid-term elections (Anderson, 2000). According to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate (CSAE) over the last three decades, voter turnout has declined dramatically resulting in a series of historic lows. One of the main reasons for this sad decline in voter turnout is the apparent lack of interest from America's students in politics.

Fewer and fewer college age students are taking the initiative to register to vote. According to a recent magazine article (Berg, 2003), America's youth today fails to realize or care about the importance of their vote. "People who are not registered to vote cannot vote. If they cannot vote, then they will not get changes made," said Sara Kaminski, President of College Democrats. It is apparent that college age students must get more involved in their government and take a greater interest in who is running our country and the issues that are affecting people their age. The interests of youth will never be heard if they do not take the initiative to go out and learn who is running for president or of issues that are affecting...

This results in disempowerment, although these young people are often ignorant of their own self-interest. The United States has undergone a "huge shift away from values and towards materialism, away from ethics and toward expediency, away from meaning and toward the symbols of status, and away from knowledge and toward a posture of being too cool to care. This failure of youth for over 30 years to embrace idealism and inject their passion into progressive politics has allowed the ascendancy of the intolerance and retrograde ideologies and policies of the right."
Voting statistics from YouthVote.org reveal that the percentage of the young aged 18-24 voting in presidential elections has dropped from the low 50% range to the high 30% range from 1972 to the present (Quinnell, 2004). As a share of the overall voting population, 18-24-year-olds have fallen to single digits. As a result, this demographic group has become virtually irrelevant to politics.

This is very…