Visualizing the Power of Democracy
After finishing up my freshman year at the University of Michigan, I had the opportunity to work on a campaign registering voters in Michigan. As someone who understands that democracy works best when everyone participates and believes that everyone’s voice matters, I was thrilled to be working on something I care so much about.
Later in the summer, I was able to combine what I learned from volunteering with the tools at Redivis to show striking trends in voter turnout over the last 10 years. I am grateful for the opportunity to share my work and provide resources to increase voter participation. Especially in the 2020 election, youth vote matters more than ever, and young people have the power to make a large impact.
Interning at PIRGIM
I started off my summer by working at PRIGIM Students, a non-partisan student advocacy organization. I was an intern on the New Voters Project, working to register 8,000 students across the state of Michigan. My efforts were focused specifically on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, but I spent weeks organizing and volunteering on the campaign to prepare for both Michigan’s August 4th primary and the November presidential election. While phone banking, we had students sign Pledges to Vote Safely, request absentee ballots, and make a plan to show up and vote for the important candidates and issues on their ballots.
While I spent much time phone banking with PIRGIM, I noticed that we were directing students to many different websites, such as StudentVote.org (PIRG’s website for registration) and Michigan’s government website, to request a mail-in ballot. At times it was confusing. I felt that it could be useful to have many resources on one website to ease communication over the phone. When I started my internship at Redivis, I had the intention of creating visuals using public data to represent some of the trends I already knew existed, so I could share them in an easy to understand way.
The Redivis Project
The purpose of the New Voters Project is to register young voters in the hope to increase their voter participation. We know that young people show up to the polls at much lower rates than older voters, but I wanted to find data to back this up and create a compelling story.
At Redivis I was able to do this. Using publicly available U.S. Census data and voting records, as well as election results, I created several visualizations to display the large differences in voter turnout by age. I spent quite a bit of time searching for the best data I could find, including talking to my PIRGIM organizer about what was available for my use. After looking around at the Michigan secretary of state website and University of Michigan library resources, the Census seemed to have everything I was looking for in a simple, thorough, and accessible format.
Using the Redivis platform, I combined data from different sources and filtered out information that was not necessary for my project. This process of “cleaning” the data was made much easier and faster by using Redivis. I was able to add in information that perhaps was not already present in the data I uploaded. For example, the voter turnout records I used were each in a separate table for each year, but I needed to add in a variable for “year” in Redivis to distinguish each from one another. You can view my Redivis project here:
Visualization
With the tables from Redivis, I created visuals on Google’s Data Studio. The most striking findings I saw from these graphs were that young people simply were not voting at the same rates as other voting-age citizens. I already knew this from my volunteer work, but the graphs made it hard to miss.
I noticed that presidential elections drew significantly larger crowds to the polls, which is to be expected.
I also found that young people’s lack of participation stems primarily from disinterest, which to me is not a good excuse.
Lastly, the states with the lowest youth turnout were (very) Republican states in 2016.
All of these findings resonated with me as a place where voter education is necessary. Many young people need to understand that politics are important to pay attention to, and all elections (presidential or otherwise) matter.
Consolidating My Work
After creating these visuals, primarily using Data Studio, I decided it would be most effective to create a website that displayed all of my work, resources, and more information in one place. The tool Carrd was an easy way to put all of my different pieces together. I hope that this site can be a tool used by not just young voters, but those who volunteered with me and are putting in the work to help protect our democracy.
I am very thankful for the opportunity at Redivis to share what I have learned and worked on this summer, and I wish for this cycle of low civic engagement to end. Looking forward to November, I know we are all anxiously awaiting the results of the election. Happy voting to everyone!
