What will young voters do?
In a presidential election, young voters are like cell-phone minutes. It’s great to have a lot of them, but if they don’t get put to use, they’re worthless. Millions of young people are eligible to vote in this presidential election — 44 million between the ages of 18 and 29, according to the latest statistics. And young voters make up a large chunk of the 9 million new voters who have registered for this year’s election. The challenge for candidates John McCain and Barack Obama is how to get young voters to show up at the polls and vote on Election Day. Getting young voters to vote has been a challenge for candidates ever since the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1971 with the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In the 2004 presidential election, less than half of eligible 18- to 24-year-olds voted, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, despite efforts by celebrities, MTV and youth voting organizations to get them involved. While the 2004 youth vote was up 11 percentage p
