We Challenged 50 Georgetown Students To Fix Our Politics.

Here’s What They Came Up With.

Just over a year ago, I walked away from a 20-year career as a political operative and went back to my alma mater to launch the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service (GU Politics).

Launched last fall, the goal of our new institute was noble: to inspire young people to get involved in politics as a form of public service.

The problem was, too many young people today don’t believe that politics can be service-minded. And too many people in my generation had become part of the problem.

As I wrote at the time:

There’s no shortage of people in my generation sitting around trying to figure out how to reengage young people. We’re going about it the wrong way.

We need young people to take the whole thing over. They’re the ones redefining activism and redefining the way we communicate. They should be the ones telling my generation how politics can be done better.

So, we put our money where our mouths are.

Over the past year, we gave ten teams of five students a simple task: tell us one thing they think sucks about politics. Then we gave them a bigger challenge: they had a semester to come up with a fix.

We purposely gave them little guidance. We didn’t want to saddle them with our preconceived notions. It was up to them to identify the problems. Our GU Politics Fellows served as informal advisors to their projects, but it was entirely up to the students to come up with the solutions.

That was it. No academic credit. No extra points. Just 50 students who care enough to find a better way.

We jokingly called it our “Political Hackathon.” And here’s what the students came up with.

Key Takeaway: The only way to make politics work better is by getting more people into it.

Some groups thought big. Others went super-granular. Some focused on how to change the system. Others looked at ways to just get more people into it.

But one theme tied all ten groups together — that the greatest threat to our political process is a decline in civic engagement, particularly by young people. And they came up with some pretty interesting ideas on how to tackle it.

Engage Students on Campus

You know that old saying by former House Speaker Tip O’Neill that “All politics is local?” Well, three of our groups took that to heart, focusing on ways to increase student engagement on campus.

• Moved by the increasing rate of gun violence across the country, one group developed a college campus organizing model to help pass ballot initiatives around the country. While primarily focused on the issue of background checks, this organizing model could easily be applied to other issues of importance to students. As the group wrote: “Colleges are perfect locations for such a movement because they locations where a concentrated group of young, enthusiastic men and women could meet and organize themselves to turn the silent majority into simply the majority.”
• Another group took an even more micro approach to engaging students on campus. Identifying the dual challenge of college students’ busy schedules and not enough information about civic engagement opportunities, the group devised the campus Residential (Social) Ambassador’s program to simply make voter information more readily available in dorms on college campuses.
• Yet another group was concerned that rates of Latino voter registration, turnout, and civic engagement remain disproportionately low relative to their growing proportion of the total population. So it decided to head the problem off at the pass. Group members developed a pilot project for a hands-on civic education program in D.C. public high schools, initially focused on communities with large Latino populations. Mandatory for all students, it would combine classroom curriculum with hands-on community engagement, helping students become invested in the process.

Arming Voters with More Information

Two of our student groups explored ways to increase voter information beyond the campus community.

• Concerned that millennial disengagement with the system was preventing young people from looking for information or even talking about politics, one group came up with an idea for a digital platform to better connect them with the process. Named Millennitics, the app would provide personalized political information to users, as well as provide a platform for political conversation with friends.

• Knowing that even with more information, too many people go into the voting booth not knowing much about the candidates. So a group developed the idea for a Voting Machine of the Future, which included non-partisan video voter guides inside the voting booth, ensuring a base level of familiarity of each candidate for every voter.

The “Anti Echo-Chamber”

• One group argued that in today’s highly-connected digital world, we are actually creating sophisticated echo-chambers that skew our perspectives. With complex algorithms that live on all of our phones and decide what information we see based on what we’ve already seen, another group feared we were creating personalized (and warped) realities. To combat this effect of customization and groupthink, the group developed an “Anti Echo-Chamber” app to deliver competing opinions to your handheld, in an effort to challenge perspectives instead of reinforcing them.

Get Milennials to Run For Office

Two different groups argued that the only way to make the political system work better for millennials was by having more millennials run for office.

• Arguing that millennials do not feel connected to politicians that do not reflect their generation either in demographics or in values, one group came up with the idea for “The Millennial Project,” a Kickstarter-like organization for political candidates. The online platform would enable young people to nominate influential peers in their community for certain offices, giving them the tools and the initial seed support to start a campaign. As the group wrote, “In a small way, we aim to address the problem of the lack of trust that young voters feel towards government, which we believe stems in part from the fact that they do not feel represented by their elected officials. Our platform would create greater accessibility and generate a new nomination pathway, inspiring community involvement in the political process and taking advantage of the new trends in technology and social media. We are hacking the nomination process.”

• Along the same lines, another group developed a social media and web campaign entitled #BuildtheBench to encourage more millennials to run for office. The site would provide information for and about millennial candidates in each state.

Revamp the Primaries

• In perhaps one of the most aggressive projects, one group argued that the current presidential nomination process is broken, causing disenfranchisement through lack of representation and transparency. So the group decided to “Hack the Presidential Primaries” by changing the order and relative weight of states in the nomination calendar, eliminating the caucus system, increasing early vote, instituting an independent primary debate commission, and elevating the importance of voters over convention delegates in the nomination process.

Expand Access to the Ballot at the State Level

• Finally, one group expressed concern that too many states allowed unfair obstacles to voting. So they developed a non-partisan toolkit for ballot access, to help states identify legislative and administrative opportunities to make it easier to vote.

The Future is Bright

With out of control campaign rhetoric and trust in government at near historic lows, it’s easy to see why young people are more disillusioned with politics now than ever.

But there is hope for the future. These 50 Georgetown students found creative solutions to some of the biggest challenges to our political system. These ideas probably won’t completely fix our politics. But maybe if we listened to them we can tinker around the edges a bit — and leave these young people with a little bit less of a mess when we turn the keys over to them.

That would be progress.

These students embody the informal motto of our Institute: “Public service is a good thing. Politics can be too.”