The League of Women Voters of Sarasota County wants to bolster young voices
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: December 20, 2024
Host: Young voters have been elusive, but lately school board politics, constitutional amendment drives, and overall concern about the future and climate change have driven teenagers and twenty-somethings into politics and to the polls. The Sarasota chapter of the League of Women Voters is trying to amplify this by way of an annual contest.
Layla Haarer
Layla Haarer: We make decisions every day. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the people we spend our time with. But one thing that affects everyone is voting. Over a century ago, women fought hard for our right to vote. From the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. They protested, marched, and even endured imprisonment for our voices to be heard. When you vote, you are honoring those who fought for us. Your vote matters. Every vote counts, even ours. Set the standard. Make your own history.
Johannes Werner: This is Layla Haarer, a twelfth-grader at Riverview High, and three of her friends, in a video she produced, depicting the history of the fight for the women’s vote. Layla won first prize and $500 from the League of Women Voters of Sarasota County for her video.
Kevin Solis of the Suncoast Polytechnical High School won first prize for his essay explaining the “Right to Vote”. And China Ott, also of Riverview, won first place for her 2-D art piece showing five diverse figures, titled “Your Voice, Your Vote”.
Jill Lewis-Spector of the League explained why her group focuses on young voters.
Jill Lewis-Spector: Well, the League of Women Voters of Florida is very aware of how important the youth vote is. Right now, the Millennials and Gen Z population make up more than half of the voting population, and yet they’re less likely to vote than older citizens. And yet, it’s a very diverse group. It’s a much more diverse population than people 50 and older. And yet, like I said, they’re not voting, but they understand how important certain issues are to diverse and marginalized populations. And we need to hear from them. They do certain things that let us know how they feel, like they will boycott companies whose policies they don’t like, or whose products they don’t think are good for the environment, things like that. But, they’re not getting to the polls, and we need them to have their voices amplified at the polls.
JW: The YVote competition, now in its third year, is part of several ways the League of Women Voters reaches out to high school students.
JLS: So the League of Women Voters has really done a lot of outreach. We’ve established some chapters at several universities in Florida, and we’re continuing to do that. Sarasota is working on getting non-college young people to vote. That has been our focus — well, at the high school level, although we cannot go in and register voters, what we do is for the last three years, we have run a YVote contest, and we’re very excited about the contest.
The contest theme this year was “Your vote is your voice,” and for the previous two years, the theme was why voting is important. And so we really work with Sarasota’s public high school students, including the charter schools. We invite them to participate in the contest, they can do a video, they can do an essay, they can do 2D artwork. And we are funded by Gulf Coast Community Foundation, which has been very generous and fully funding us for the past three years.
We’d like to be more involved with the high schools. We’re going to be meeting with Superintendent Connor right after the holidays. And hopefully that will be part of our discussion. I have spoken with Ron Turner and it does not seem like we can go into the high schools and do voter registration or any civics education, which I know is possible in some other states, but it doesn’t seem possible in Florida, or at least not in Sarasota. So we will see what is possible and try to continue to work with the high school students and get them to appreciate how important their vote is and we certainly understand all the other ways in which they do advocacy, all the grassroots work that they do, a lot of them come to school board meetings and speak out on issues that are of concern to them, and that’s wonderful. But we really need them to get to the polls.
JW: Johannes Werner, WSLR News.
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