ATLANTA — "Vote Early Day" is Friday, October 28, and events are happening across metro Atlanta to rally college students to get out and cast their ballots.
Emory University students can gather for a "Walk/March to the Polls" event starting at 2 p.m. Students will walk to Dekalb County's new voting site on the university campus. The addition Clifton Road polling site is welcome for students with the Emory Votes Initiative.
"Young voters opinions are so important right now," Sofia Damer-Salas, a junior at Emory University, said, and added, "I think, when you're young, you don't always feel like the policies are going to affect you because we do kind of live in a bubble on campus."
And students like Damer-Salas and Mike Sandifer are hoping to change that narrative. It's part of the student-led push to get students to vote in the 2022 midterms.
"A lot of tabling, a lot of promoting," Sandifer explained the efforts. "Stopping students while they're walking to class.'
While Sandifer acknowledges that younger voters may have been discounted in past elections due to historically low turnout, the Emory Votes Initiative is working to ensure that this election cycle is not the case. The nonpartisan group has been working for months to register and educate students on the process, even ensuring non-Georgia voters have the info they need for their home state.
"I think nationwide there has been a shift in the political climate for young people, college-age voters," Sandifer said. "There's a lot on the table for us, and we want to get out and make our voice heard and known."
"The policies that are put in place now will affect us years from now," Damer-Salas agreed. "So it's really important to make your opinions known and make your voice heard.
Nationwide, more young voters are indeed showing up compared to years past.
According to an analysis by Tufts University, "Fifty percent of young people, ages 18-29, voted in the 2020 presidential election, a remarkable 11-point increase from 2016 (39%) and likely one of the highest rates of youth electoral participation since the voting age was lowered to 18."
"College students are a captive population," Dr. Andra Gillespi, an 11Alive political analyst, said. "So activities that target young people to remind them of the fact that they are now of age and have the right to vote are really effective way of personally reaching students to get them to turn out to vote."
Gillespie said in battleground states like Georgia, such turnout could also be critical for tight races.
"These races, a lot of them, are going to be decided by single digit margins, and that's particularly true in the U.S. Senate race," Gillespie explained. "And so given the fact that. We expect that this race could be decided not by hundreds of thousands of votes, but maybe by tens of thousands of votes; being able to generate additional turnout among youth voters could be the difference between winning and losing a contest."
Vote Early Day was created in 2020 by MTVE, together with a coalition of more than 3,400 companies, nonprofits, technology platforms, election administrators, influencers, and organizations, and created a national early voting movement.
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