Minnesota House of Representatives
Brennan McWilliams once thought voting meant circling a candidate’s name and dropping a piece of paper in a box. Although his history and government courses at Century High School in Rochester, Minnesota, covered the Constitution and the importance of voting, he did not learn about the real-world process until seeing it firsthand.
When McWilliams turned 16 in 2022, he campaigned for the re-election of a local school board member and found out about a Minnesota program that trains 16- and 17-year-olds as volunteer election judges. “A lot of places are getting divided over small things, it’s something I don’t want to happen to Rochester,” he says. “In my neighborhood, next-door neighbors will have Trump vs. Kamala signs promoting different stuff, and we’ll still see them hanging out during the day, just having a drink together, and I think that’s cool.”
As a trainee, McWilliams helps set up the polling station and guides voters through the same-day registration and voting process on Election Day. Now a senior, McWilliams credits this election-season volunteer job with strengthening his interest in local politics and voting in his city of 120,000 people.
Minnesota had the third-highest youth voter turnout (behind Michigan and Maine) in the 2022 midterms: 35.5 percent of eligible voters aged 18 to 29 showed up at the polls, according to Tufts’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). The North Star State also led the country in youth voter turnout in 2018 at nearly 44 percent, a historically “high watermark” in youth participation, says Alberto Medina, the communications team lead at CIRCLE. He attributed that increase to the post-Parkland gun violence prevention movement that spurred young people’s engagement in voting across the country.
How does Minnesota foster civic engagement, and most importantly, voting, among young people? Shane Baker, McWilliams’s social studies teacher, sees “tension” points, such as the Israel-Gaza conflict and abortion, which are affecting students and prompting discussions. These conversations, Baker notes, stem from political conversations at home. “As a teacher, I can influence some things, but it’s really that political socialization that’s happening at home,” says Baker. “Most families are aware that they should be voting, so high voter turnout is not a surprise.”
In 2020, nearly 80 percent of all eligible Minnesota voters cast a ballot, the highest in the country.
Medina credited Minnesota’s high levels of civic participation to a collective interest in cultivating democratic values. “Election officials in places like Minneapolis are making concerted efforts to bring people into democracy, which, unfortunately, we don’t see everywhere in the country,” he says. He also pointed to civics classes in public schools, volunteer opportunities, like the election judge trainee program (he worked with election officials in Minneapolis to establish the program for kids under 18), and “facilitative election laws” such as preregistration, automatic voter registration, online registration, and same-day registration, motivating young people to vote and stay engaged in the democratic process.
“The younger that someone begins voting,” Medina says, “the more likely they are to vote for the rest of their lives because it just becomes a habit, a part of their identity.”
The Minnesota Department of Education requires that high school students take several social studies credits in order to graduate, including a government or citizenship course, by 11th or 12th grade. Baker says most high schools place the course “as close to voting age as possible,” so teachers can discuss election cycles with their students.
Last year, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed the Democracy for the People Act to increase voter access. The state’s motor vehicle department automatically registers people to vote when they apply for or renew a driver’s license, instruction permit, or state identification card. It also preregisters 16- and 17-year-olds to vote. Now the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Walz said in a 2023 statement about the law: “This bill will strengthen our democracy, allow future voters to get engaged early, and keep our campaigns honest and fair.”
The secretary of state’s office also provides election-year voting guides as well as guides for conducting mock elections in high schools. It also sponsors the Democracy Cup, a collegiate competition held every two years, when colleges across the state compete to have the highest percentage of eligible students turn out to vote.
Colleges like St. Olaf in Northfield pick up where high schools leave off. The college has dominated the Democracy Cup thanks to initiatives like its 2020 election ambassador program, which encourages civic engagement on campus. St. Olaf also had the highest voting rate out of 500 competing universities and colleges nationwide, according to the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. With just over 3,000 students, 90 percent of students registered to vote and 67 percent of students voted in the 2022 midterms.
Elijah Sonntag, a St. Olaf senior and a former election ambassador, says personal interactions are the key to motivating young people to vote. During the 2022 midterms, he knocked on dorm doors to talk to students and set up tables with flyers and voting resources around campus. St. Olaf students have an on-campus polling place—a “lifesaver” for Sonntag. He knows many college students do not have transportation, and walking 30 minutes to the closest polling place is too time-consuming for students.
One Minnesota school, Augsburg University in Minneapolis, even cancels classes on Election Day. Beginning in 2008 (and again in 2012 and 2020), students at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities tried and failed to persuade administrators to give them the day off to vote. The Minnesota Daily, the student paper, reported in 2008 that a university spokesperson said the school does not want to provide a “blank check for students to miss class.”
Same-day voter registration, which Minnesota enacted in 1974, is also helpful for college students. “You have so many things on your plate with assignments,” says Sonntag, “that filling out that voter registration, even though it’s not super time-consuming, at least in Minnesota, that can accidentally slip and we miss that deadline.”
In 2020, nearly 80 percent of all eligible Minnesota voters cast a ballot, the highest in the country. The new roster of voter tools, combined with an already strong awareness about voting, promises to keep Minnesota youth way out ahead of their peers across the country.
