Brianna Cea is the Executive Director and Founder of Generation Vote, an organization working to build a youth-led movement that fights for young people’s right to vote and a just democracy for all.
I remember one of the first times I felt passionate about voting. It was in my U.S. History class in middle school, when I learned about the brave young people like John Lewis and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee who fought for my right to vote as a young Asian American woman. My 13-year-old self couldn’t wait to vote in my first election, because the message was as clear then as it is now: My vote is my voice.
However, my voice — and the voices of young voters like me across the country — is at risk of being silenced.
With a record number of restrictive voting bills introduced in state legislatures in recent years and a disturbing number of election deniers already in and running for office, our country’s ability to have free and fair elections is at stake like never before. What’s more, 2024 is the first presidential election since election-denying insurrectionists — inspired by Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election results — stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This time around, Trump has yet to confirm whether he will accept the results of the 2024 election and is once again sowing the seeds of election denialism. This creates terrifying possibilities for what may come after Nov. 5 this year.
Without a functioning government, we have no way to fight for anything else.
For many, these possibilities are galvanizing: New polling published in September 2024 from political advocacy group Public Wise shows that, when asked to identify the single-most important issue this election, older Democrats are currently the core constituency motivated by “protecting democracy.” However, the polling shows a far smaller number of young voters feel as strongly about this issue, and that is alarming.
In the 2020 presidential election, estimates placed youth turnout at around 50%, up from 39% in 2016. Since the 2022 midterm elections, there are 8 million more young people who have turned 18 and will be eligible to vote this November — contributing to the total of 41 million Gen Zers who are eligible to vote this year. As the most diverse generation ever, our strength is in numbers — and that’s threatening to those who wish to undermine our democracy. Just this past year, a bill was introduced in Texas to ban polling places from college campuses, and new anti-youth voter laws kicked into effect in Ohio and Idaho, removing student photo IDs as valid voter identification. Clearly, our voices are at risk of being suppressed, and it’s up to us to demand that we’re heard.
In 2022, Generation Vote relaunched as a national organization to make electoral justice a major priority for young voters. We’re working to spark an intersectional movement of young people to fight for youth voting rights and reimagine a just democracy for all. Since then, I’ve traveled around the country speaking to hundreds of young people, and I often hear a version of the same question: Why should I care about “democracy” when I’m worried about my access to abortion, my rent is too damn high, and climate disasters are only getting worse?Â
I completely understand these questions, since young people have been historically ignored by candidates, and Gen Z voters are increasingly motivated by issues, not political parties. But my response to these young people is always this: In order to address any of these critical issues, we need a functioning democracy that not only protects our right to vote, but empowers us to have a say on the issues that matter to us — because without a functioning government, we have no way to fight for anything else.
This is why, this year, Generation Vote held the first youth-led Electoral Justice Summit in the U.S. and launched the largest nonpartisan youth-led election protection program to recruit young people to protect our elections and help voters in battleground states exercise their right to vote in November. Further, this October, we launched Count on Us, a new campaign anchored by national youth-led organizations to mobilize thousands of young people to ensure every vote counts, defy attempts to deny our freedom to vote and after Election Day, coordinate our efforts to ensure we swear in a government elected by the people.Â
I know my middle school self, just learning about the sanctity of our democracy, would be so proud of the work I’m doing to mobilize my generation to fight for our right to vote and turn the promise of a just democracy into a reality. Young people are far from apathetic — we care deeply about the issues that impact our communities the most. But we need to understand that in order to address these issues, we first need to protect our democracy — and that should be the unifying issue that mobilizes our generation to the polls this November. This is our generation’s future that is being decided, and we can’t take our freedoms for granted.