On Wednesday morning, Steve Simon stood in a dim auditorium in front of hundreds of high school juniors and seniors in Albert Lea, Minn., to ask if they've ever seen the inside of a polling place before.
Only a few hands shot up, which is to be expected, given most of the students are not yet old enough to vote.
Then Minnesota's secretary of state turned to his pitch: They'd soon be old enough to go to the polls and cast their ballot, and a new law allows eligible 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register so they are automatically in the system when they turn 18.
"Your vote is your voice," said Simon. "You get formal political power, and that is meaningful and that is valuable, and you cannot and should not leave that on the table."
As students head back into classrooms this fall, Simon plans to appear in high schools around the state to publicize the law change, part of a broader effort to foster strong voting habits in a demographic group that's the most challenging to engage in the civic process. In Minnesota, there are an estimated 150,000 16- and 17-year-olds who are now eligible to pre-register to vote, according to numbers provided by the Secretary of State's Office.
Those who are eligible to pre-register can fill out a regular voter registration form on the Secretary of State's website. If someone is a resident and 16 or 17 years old, their information will be flagged in the system as a pre-registration. On their 18th birthday, they will be automatically added to the state's list of registered voters.
That's helpful to the state to cut down on same-day registrations ahead of a major presidential election year, but studies also show that engaging youth in the election process before they are eligible to vote helps demystify it and establish lifelong voting habits.
"The more we give young people the opportunity to think ahead about voting and elections the more likely they are to participate, and not just because of the momentum," said Michael Wall, who works to engage young people in voting and government as outreach director for the YMCA's Center for Youth Voice.
Right after high school, many younger voters are heading off to college, getting jobs or both, Wall said, and figuring out how to register to vote can get pushed to the backburner.
"Young people have shared anecdotally the notion that they would rather pass and wait until they know what they're doing than show up for an activity and be seen as someone who doesn't know what's going on," he said.
Other groups are also pushing to tell high schoolers about the new law, including the League of Women Voters of Minnesota, which is creating a toolkit to give schools examples of social media posts and student announcements to let them know about how to pre-register, said executive director Michelle Witte.
DFL Party Chair Ken Martin said the party is in early conversations with groups such as Young Democrats of America and High School Democrats of America on how to engage with younger voters to get them signed up, but he also wants to team up with the state Republican Party to do events geared at pre-registration.
The millennial and Gen Z generations are now the largest voting bloc in the American electorate, but they turn out at lower numbers than other age groups.
In the 2022 election, 23% of 18- to 29-year-olds nationally turned out to vote, lower than in the record-breaking 2018 midterm cycle, where 28% of youth voters cast ballots, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
But Martin said the youth vote has been growing the last several election cycles, and he doesn't see that slowing down.
"They are very politically minded, they care deeply about issues," he said. "What they haven't done is connect the dots yet between their advocacy and voting, and why voting matters and how voting can actually lead to change."
Michigan had the highest youth turnout in the country at 37%, but Minnesota was among a group of four states that also saw above 30% turnout from young voters in 2022. Minnesota joins 15 other states and Washington, D.C., that allow voters as young as 16 to pre-register to vote.
At the assembly, Simon posed for selfies, did a short interview with a student TV program and played up Minnesota's No. 1 status for voter turnout to encourage the students to sign up to vote.
Jaylee Waters, a senior involved in student government at Albert Lea High School, said she recently turned 18 and wasn't registered to vote yet. She planned to this week after attending the assembly.
"Not a lot of us students know much about voting. Granted, we have our government classes and whatnot, but some kids don't have parental figures that share that information," Waters said. "The fact that we were able to get the whole school together today to talk about it was awesome."
