The following post is by Spencer Keys. He's a government relations consultant based in Ottawa, and a former student leader. He can be found at twitter.com/spencerkeys.

As a vain 28-year-old, I get a giddy thrill every time something I’ve written is re-tweeted. This election has been a boom for my ego, but more importantly, if my Twitter followers are any indication, it has pointed out a deep interest in youth voting. When I say, contrary to popular wisdom, that students vote, my followers go ape.

But that’s the truth. It was something I intuitively believed, but Carson Jerema at Maclean’s pointed me to the empirical evidence. University student voting has remained consistent over the past several decades, comparable to the rest of society. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to vote.

Whenever youth voting is popularly discussed it usually suffers from a categorization problem: it’s allowed to stand that students are representative of youth as a whole, and that inordinate resources should be spent convincing them to go do something they were already going to do.

Vote mobs, Rick Mercer rants, student union get-out-the-vote efforts, and the media that report on these phenomena all spend their time focused on the low-hanging fruit. Students are educated, benefit from positively reinforcing peer effects, and are easy to find by virtue of being on university or college campuses.

By contrast, less educated youth suffer from negatively reinforcing peer effects, are geographically spread out, and are generally tuned out from political issues. They are less knowledgeable about politics, and are also less interested.

Today’s youth are more educated than ever, but voter turnout is still going down. That means the participation of non-student youth is plummeting even faster than the trends suggest.
There are different kinds of youth, and many aren’t students. We have to recognize that, or we’ll never deal with the problem.

Before proposing some modest solutions, I’ll dispel some of the lazy ones that float around.

• If somebody tells you youth are turned off by the tone of politics, they don’t know what they are talking about. Youth are no more dissatisfied with politics than older Canadians, and are actually more optimistic about it.
• If somebody tells you the internet is the way to engage youth, they don’t know what they are talking about. Canadians who haven’t enrolled in post-secondary studies use the internet “to read newspapers or magazines about a particular social or political issue” less often than those with more education. Sixty-three percent of Canadians with a university degree use the internet for those purposes, and 54.9 percent of those with at least some post-secondary education do the same. But only 44 percent of those with just a high-school diploma use the internet for political research, and that number drops to 37 percent for those who never finished high school. The internet can deepen engagement, but it rarely broadens it.
• If somebody tells you that youth are just expressing their politics in other ways, they don’t know what they are talking about. Young Canadians are less likely to be active in volunteer groups than other Canadians, and that doesn’t change if the group is dedicated to “youth-friendly” issues. Those who do participate in political activities are substantially more likely to vote than their peers. Again, the excuse isn’t borne out by facts.

So what’s the answer?

I don’t know. But neither do youth groups, political parties or Elections Canada. Simply put, my guess is work harder.

U.S. elections have exhibited massive increases in get-out-the-vote efforts and door-to-door persuasion, particularly in the past decade. And youth voting is on the rise. But although the Obama campaign proved that social media matter, they don’t engage youth all on their own. Social media deepen the connection of those who are already engaged, and leverage them into volunteers. Obama won because he had a massive army of volunteers that were empowered by social media to go door-to-door on their own, or do phone-banking from the comfort of their home. Door knocking can boost turnout by 8 percent, and phone calls can increase it another 3–5 percent.

Political parties are responsible for this. Because youth don’t feel that voting is a responsibility of citizenship, the parties are the only ones that can produce a meaningful call to action by trying to persuade youth to come out and vote for them.

In the meantime, let’s stop listening to the armchair strategists that think youth voter turnout can be raised by raising awareness among those who were already going to vote, and start doing the hard work of engaging the silent, unreached masses. Warning: you may have to get off your iPhone.

Blog photo by Mike Lakusiak.