With Election Day mere days away, I wanted to take a few minutes to share the work that PIRG students are doing on the ground to make sure young people have the motivation and tools they need to make their voices heard in this election. The New Voters Project has one mission: to achieve full participation of young people (aged 18-24) in the democratic process.
Since 1984, we’ve helped register more than 2 million young people to vote, made more than 3 million personalized Get Out The Vote contacts, and helped dozens of colleges and universities develop civic action plans, all while training thousands of students in the citizenship, leadership and campaigning skills necessary to run voter engagement and mobilization campaigns.
Created on college campuses 50 years ago, the Student PIRGs have built the nation’s most effective non-partisan youth civic engagement network, consisting of student-led organizations on more than 30 campuses as well as PIRG Campus Action clubs on 60 additional campuses.
PIRG campus chapters and clubs organize students year-round on a variety of issue campaigns, maintaining and expanding a permanent organizing infrastructure and leadership development pipeline on college campuses. This decades-long investment in youth organizing means that campuses where we organize are more civically engaged and students are more likely to turn out to vote.
We are proud of our students working hard at campuses across the country to help register their fellow students and make sure that their elected leaders at the local, state and national levels hear from them. The growth in young people voting is already a win for democracy.
And in that spirit, I wanted to share with you a piece written by Sierra Ferrante, the chapter chair for CALPIRG at UC Santa Barbara, about the great work New Voters Project groups are doing in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia to help register new voters and help them to cast their ballots.
Activists Boosting Turnout Through Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project
by Sierra Ferrante on October 14, 2024
Targeting Students in PA, GA, MI
Student activists in dozens of states across the country are continuing the work of the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project (NVP), the oldest and largest non-partisan youth voter initiative in the United States. It aims to empower students to educate and register their peers about voting. In 2024, that work carries particular weight in places such as Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan, where young voters could play a pivotal role in determining the election results.
“Your right to vote is your voice. You need to utilize that. My goal is to register as many students as possible so they are able to vote on issues they care about,” says Lucas Gravatt, a senior Political Science major at Michigan State University who got involved with NVP this year.
Annalese Earley, PIRGs’ national NVP coordinator and a 3rd-year Politics, Philosophy, and Economics student at the University of Pittsburgh, says the team has been hosting twice-weekly national trainings, providing resources to college students across the country, and has even started involving interested high school students. Gravatt says that tapping into the national NVP team has allowed students at MSU to grow their operation from just four interns last school year to more than ten this fall, with an additional twenty to thirty volunteers who work on the project on campus.
At Georgia State University (GSU), Georgia PIRG Students have worked with dozens of volunteers on voter registration, as well as events to engage them in political discourse with campus organizations from across the political spectrum. “It’s important that young people are advocating for the issues that they care about, and voting is the primary way that we can interact with our government, so getting young people to vote is very important,” says Caleb Gustavson, a second-year Public Policy and Philosophy major who heads the project at GSU.
At the University of Pittsburgh, students have organized fun events such as Plant to Vote, where they handed out bouquets and talked to students about their election day plans, as well as tabling around campus during Pennsylvania’s Vote Early Days. Earley explains that NVP only started working on the Pitt campus this year, but has quickly seen an impact. “We had our highest turnout in registries and Pledges to Vote ever at Pitt, and we feel that these events that we’re doing are going towards something,” she says.
Michigan has been a state with very close margins in both 2016 and 2020, where young people will play a pivotal role in deciding the race. Gravatt says you can feel the excitement within the state. “A lot of us were sixteen or seventeen in 2020… and got to see from afar on the TV all this stuff that’s happening, but now we actually have a voice to input into that,” he says.
MSUPIRG students have hosted tables to give students vital information about the voting process. For example, they gave students maps of the different precincts and contact information of their local election offices, as well as had conversations about other items appearing on the November ballot outside of the presidential race.
The students emphasized the collaborative nature of their work on campus. Organizers at GSU have hosted events attended by organizations across party lines, including Bridge USA, Turning Point USA, Young Democratic Socialists of America, and College Republicans, “organizations, who, on their own, have differences with each other… but at the end of the day, there is a lot of commonality in the issues that we care about. All of us want to see young people registered in force because we are the largest and most diverse voting population,” Gustavson explains.
The students from Pitt have similarly paired up with their school’s Democratic Engagement Coalition, which is a non-partisan organization that helps to connect different student groups of many political affiliations to do work related to civic engagement and to help make voting more accessible to students on campus. “Voting is not a national holiday in this country, so no one can necessarily go stand in line for hours at the polls,” explains Earley, “but if we have more opportunities to go vote, there would be a higher turnout.”
She expressed gratitude to the University of Pittsburgh for working to implement policies such as making classes virtual on election day so that students can go to the polls, and hopes that other universities will follow suit. “NVP strives for all voices to be heard and represented in this election, and it starts with actions similar to Pitt’s,” she says.
Several of the students expressed that what keeps them motivated is seeing the direct impact they can have on their peers. Many students care and want to become civically engaged, but for first-time voters, the major barrier is knowing how to register and how to vote. “NVP is such a big deal because we’re reducing the informational costs of voting,” says Gravatt, who explains that the volunteers can assist students in registration, text them with reminders on election day, or provide specific directions to polling or ballot-drop locations. “Waving a student over to a table, and them being like, ‘thank you so much, I didn’t know how to do this,’ or ‘I had no idea where I was supposed to go,’ … I think that’s really rewarding and is something that motivates me to continue to talk to more students,” says Clara Gilles, a 3rd-year Political Science and Philosophy major who serves as the President of PennPIRG at Pitt.
When asked about students who may feel apprehensive towards the voting process, Gravatt emphasized that voting is about more than just this presidential race, and the importance of the youth voice not just at the federal level, but in state and local politics. He believes that students should view voting as a way to signal to their representatives what it is they care about so that their ideas will be displayed in future policies.
Gustavson echoed this in speaking about how NVP seeks to remind students that voting is an integral part of democracy and that students should participate now and for the rest of their lives. “Voting is something that needs to be kept up with,” he says. “It needs to be done every single year, or every time there is an election because we’re not going to be able to see the change that young people want if we’re only voting in the big presidential races.”
| About The Student PIRGs |
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| The Student PIRGs’ mission is to ensure students have the skills, opportunities and training they need to create a better, more sustainable future for all of us. Our youth civic engagement network of 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) student-directed and funded organizations across the country has nearly 300,000 dues-paying student members in 11 states. Each year, 4,000 students get their first hands-on experience in organizing and activism while volunteering with us. Every year, we reach hundreds of thousands of students and generate 150,000 grassroots actions. Since our founding, the Student PIRGs have trained over 1 million volunteers. |