Guest Commentary written by

Laura Brill

Laura W. Brill is the CEO and founder of The Civics Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit promoting young voters. She is also an attorney and clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

My email inbox is full of news about poll results, and increasingly they’re about California. Likely voters, they say, are leaning this way or that on various ballot measures or in the race to be mayor of Los Angeles or our state’s next governor.

One thing the polls never discuss is the unregistered voter. I’m not talking about people who are ineligible or who have chosen not to participate. I’m talking about the roughly 1 million young people in California who are eligible to vote but no one has helped them to register.

That means they aren’t in the voter files, so pollsters deem them “unlikely” to vote. 

For many that’s not because of an inherent lack of interest in politics. Candidates and campaigns often make no real effort to reach them and get them registered. Nor does anyone else.

It’s a vicious cycle. It’s also a big mistake. 

In California — as in at least 20 other states and Washington D.C. — eligible voters have a right to show up on Election Day, get registered and cast their ballots. Their votes count the same as yours, mine and everyone else the pollsters have deemed “likely” to vote.

A huge number of the missing voters are young. Let’s start with the youngest: Based on state voter files and American Community Survey data, there are nearly 300,000 18-year-old Californians who are eligible but not yet registered to vote. That’s 56% of California’s 18-year-olds.

But it’s not just 18-year-olds. The California Secretary of State reported recently that more than 4 million eligible adults of all ages were not registered to vote. But among California’s 4.2 million citizens who are almost 18 to 25 years old, 1.4 million are unregistered (California allows teens to pre-register as early as age 16).

Same-day and early registration voting means they still have a chance to make choices today. 

Why are the youngest voters routinely excluded in this way? It’s not as if there’s no money available to welcome them to our democracy and help them cast their first ballots. 

Ballotpedia reported last week that nearly $800 million had been spent on California’s ballot measures — and that doesn’t include money spent on candidate campaigns. Imagine if just a fraction of that went to educating the youngest voters about the issues on our ballot and to get them ready to weigh in.

The numbers tell us the opportunity for engagement is there. The Civics Center looked at the voter files for four states with same-day registration on Election Day, including California. All four experience a huge spike in 18-year-olds registering to vote on that final day versus any other day of the year.

And this probably won’t come as a surprise, but people who register to vote close to an election tend to turn out at high rates, our analysis found. That’s the reason they are getting registered in the first place — they want to vote.

The next time you read a poll, instead of worrying or seeking reassurance about our favored candidate or ballot measure, we should ask: Who is missing and what can we do to fix that? 

I’d also love to ask the pollsters: How do you know young unregistered Americans are unlikely to vote, when you don’t poll them in the first place?