The United States has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the world. And it’s even worse for young voters: Just 41 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds cast ballots in 2012, according to a U.S. Census report—a phenomenon often taken as a sign of apathy. But what if there’s something else that’s at least partly responsible? If we’re being honest, voting is harder than it should be.
At a time when you can buy almost anything you want with a single click and have it delivered to your house the next day, voting stands out as a transaction from another era. If you are a first-time voter or have recently moved, you have to request a registration form, fill it out and mail it to your election office, all a month before the election. If you’re lucky enough to live in a place with lenient absentee balloting rules, you can vote by mail, but that still means another form, another envelope, another deadline to remember (two, actually: one to request your ballot and another to mail it in time). If you’re voting in person, you have to find your polling station and go there, on a Tuesday no less. It is, in short, an enormous pain.
Seth Flaxman noticed just how cumbersome the voting process could be when he was studying at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and realized he’d missed several local elections. Flaxman doesn’t fit the stereotype of a disengaged young voter: A former Columbia University student body president who’d always been “obsessed with, fascinated by elections,” he was studying for a master’s in public policy. “I’m not an apathetic person, so if I’m missing elections there must be a problem with the process,” he says. Continue reading “The Simple Fix That May Change How We Vote Forever”