How Missouri college students are helping their peers prepare for Election Day

Young Americans have long been described as less politically educated and engaged than older generations, based on research their voting histories.

According to Adriana Paes, founder of the newly created civic education group Citizen Action AllianceThese assumptions are moving further and further away from reality.

“I’ve heard a myth about young people that they are apathetic, ignorant and don’t know what’s going on in the world,” Paes says. “I have learned from my own experience that this is absolutely not the case.”

Paes is a 41-year-old graduate student in the UMKC School of Education. She recently became one of many students in Missouri working to train thousands of potential voters on the state’s college campuses.

Across Missouri, millennial and Gen Z students are mobilizing to help their younger peers access information about how to vote. They spent hundreds of hours on things like civil society engagement campaigns and voter registration campaigns. Research reflects the growing power of this demographic; This year, 41 million Gen Zers are eligible to vote.

The country is aging some suggest younger voters will soon decide our elections. But civic education is missing.

Another Missouri College student, Logan Kuykendall, who is studying government and politics at the University of Missouri, has conducted numerous voter advocacy efforts on campus. He shares Paez’s view that Missouri’s young electorate is more informed than people think.

“When it comes to the election itself,” Kuykendall says, “students usually have a very good idea of what’s going on. “They have a good general idea of what’s on the ballot and a good idea of what’s on the ballot.”

Kuykendall is president of the MU chapter. Associated Studentsa nonpartisan student government organization that advocates for college students and their interests in local and state government.

Kuykendall said his Student Association chapter attracted hundreds of students to the MU campus this fall.

“Between August and the registration deadline here in Missouri, we registered over 500 students and staff (to vote),” he explains. “We have attracted over 1,700 students to the events we host.”

Kuykendall says this involvement is part of the chapter’s election education and voter registration initiative called Vote for Mizzou.

While the initiative took several different directions depending on the timeline of the election cycle, Kuykendall says students most needed help with the rapidly changing details of the voting process.

“When it comes to specific details, like when you have to notarize (forms), what a notary is…students need help,” he says. “Which, frankly, is completely fair because these rules and regulations change every year.”

Adriana Paes’ work also focuses on what students must do before voting and how the rules have changed.

She says she insists on sharing information about Missouri. new voter ID laws. She’s concerned that many college students voting for the first time in this election don’t know about it.

“As a student in 2022, we passed some of the strictest voter ID laws in the country, which included making it impossible for students to use their university IDs as voter ID (at the polls),” explains Paez. “The students didn’t know about it. I started making these little zines to try to get the message out.”

Paes says she spent a lot of free time this semester creating infographics and magazines so that UMKC students can share them on social media. Most of them focused on different scenarios for students who wanted to vote absentee, including what they would need based on their specific situation.

She also worked to bring other student groups together to work together on larger events. She recently helped organize voting resource fair at UMKC, where students could learn more about voting rules and requirements, as well as what will be on their local ballot.

While she’s pleased with student feedback, Paez is concerned that much of the same work done on college campuses is done by university students rather than employees.

“(To my knowledge) we do not have a single staff member at UMKC who is involved in constituent outreach or civil society outreach as part of their job,” she says. “If students want to do these things, then they should do them. They take ownership of what (I think) the university should be doing.”

Logan Kuykendall says his Student Association chapter has received a lot of help through the Vote Mizzou initiative from Mizzou students and staff, but much of the work is unpaid.

“Yes, with the exception of our HR consultant, everything else is done by volunteers, including our own students,” explains Kuykendall. “But everyone has been absolutely amazing and incredibly helpful.”

Paez is concerned that the heavy reliance on volunteer work from student organizations and outside groups limits the number of students their work can reach.

Because the pace civic literacy And civic education Paes believes more advocacy work is needed to push Missouri universities to take a more active role in connecting students to voting resources and creating civic action plans.

“There are various national organizations that encourage college campuses to create such plans and use them to reach more and more students,” she says. “They can help create a more informed and engaged population.”

Disclosure: KCUR 89.3 is licensed by the University of Missouri Board of Regents and is an independent editorial public service of the University of Missouri-Kansas City.