Youth Voter Suppression Is a Policy Problem. We Need Policy Solutions.
On April 20, a leading voice in conservative politics said the quiet part out loud: Republicans should make it harder for young people to vote.

Charlotte Hill is the interim director of the Democracy Policy Initiative at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, where she recently earned her Ph.D. At UC Berkeley, she focuses her research on expanding democratic access and equity through public policy. Her work has been featured in political science journals as well as in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and Vox. Before joining academia, Hill worked for various organizations, including Change.org and RepresentUs. She cofounded Fix Our House, a new education and advocacy campaign promoting proportional representation in Congress, and sat on the boards of nonpartisan election reform organizations FairVote and RepresentUs. She is the current vice president of the Oakland Public Ethics Commission and the former vice president of the San Francisco Elections Commission. As a contributor to Democracy Docket, Hill writes about how structural reforms impact American democracy.
On April 20, a leading voice in conservative politics said the quiet part out loud: Republicans should make it harder for young people to vote.
GOP leaders are intentionally imposing new barriers to the voter registration process. What a shame.
Election deniers lost several high-profile races in the midterms and Democrats performed better than expected, but democracy remains in jeopardy.
The solution to our current crisis of democracy: proportional representation and a multiparty system. It’s proven to ensure that all votes count equally, all voters are better represented and anti-democratic forces are sidelined.
The Republican Party is attempting to secure and retain political control by manipulating how votes are to cast, where those votes count and whether they even count at all.
Understanding how young people are especially burdened by the voting process is essential for diagnosing shortcomings of our current voting system — and for identifying the specific policy changes most likely to increase youth turnout.
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