National Voter Awareness Month – Why We’re Espousing It
Written by: Chris Dhanaraj
In light of the fact that SAVE is espousing the idea, it would probably be appropriate for us to actually explain why we think it’s important to have one. I’m sure many would immediately scoff at the idea, remarking that anything and everything has some day allotted for it. They would call the idea trivial, with minimal impact. Look at Lincoln’s Day, or Memorial Day – school kids look at those days with little other than the glee of a day off of school. Having an official month would do nothing.
But yet, look at the month of February, the official Black History month. Elementary schools, high schools, even colleges showcase a startling amount of information and activities during this month designed to educate and inform our youth of cultured history of the African Americans. And it has worked to an absolutely phenomenal degree. When Black History month was first instituted in 1926, African Americans in general were still looked down upon. The sheer amount of inventions and learning that African American’s had committed into history was barely recalled in American history books. Yet with time and hard work, African Americans regained their rightful place in history books. Most now can instantly recall the names of George Washington Carver, a man who discovered and invented hundreds of items, or W.E.B. Dubois, one of the founders of the NAACP.
So we at SAVE are applying that successful model to the National Voter Awareness Month. Currently, there is tragic lack of education revolving around the concept of registering to vote and voting itself. A survey conducted by the Utah Statesman showed that in collegiate students, 93% percent of the population said they weren’t registered to vote simply because they didn’t know how, and 48% of registered students didn’t know where and when to vote.
Those numbers, quite simply, cannot remain. Ninety-three percent not registered because they don’t know how is not merely a failure on the part of the students, it’s a failure on the part of the entire American school systems. SAVE’s answer to try to combat that is the National Voter Awareness Month (”NVAM”), and it is our fervent hope that NVAM will be implemented as quickly as possible so we can start working our way to being an informed and involved student generation.
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