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Youth Vote Overseas: Interview with Clair Whitmer (Part 1)
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Youth Vote Overseas
Election time is just around the corner, so where does this leave young Americans traveling overseas? According to the Institute of International Education, the number of Americans studying abroad alone increased by eight percent—reaching a total of 241,791—for the 2006/2007 academic year. With more than 5.25 million U.S. citizens living outside of America, at least one organization in particular understands the importance of young voters and has decided to help young Americans living abroad vote in American elections. Clair Whitmer, the Program Director of Youth Vote Overseas, knows how important it is to encourage young voters to take part in the electoral process and explains the mission of Youth Vote Overseas.
What is Youth Vote Overseas and its purpose?
YVO is a nonprofit, nonpartisan website with one mission: to help young Americans overseas vote in federal elections. There are a lot of sites aimed at registering young people, but we're the only site aimed at 18-29 year olds overseas, most notably study abroad students. We help them navigate the voting process from outside the country. The main problem is that it takes more time, sometimes a lot more time, depending on where you live. Even in countries with super-efficient postal systems, like where I live in France, it can literally take weeks, even months, to complete the process. And some states have extra requirements, like having to get your ballot notarized. New legislation is eliminating these more obscure rules over time, thank goodness. But it's still true, that if you make one little mistake, it can be too late to vote by the time you figure it out. OVF makes it simple - we've automated all the quirky questions and take care to "walk" people through the steps in an understandable way.
All of that infrastructure comes from our parent website, Overseas Vote Foundation (OVF). Youth Vote Overseas became an official unique outreach program last year with our own communications and a website design more geared toward young voters. OVF believes that young voters overseas merit this special attention and that to make it work, it would take investment and commitment over time.
Why is it important for young adults overseas to vote?
Our users include young expats, either children of expat families or people who get overseas jobs just of school, including a lot of teachers. But our outreach focuses on study abroad programs. All the studies show that people who vote for the first time in the first election after their 18th birthday are more likely to vote throughout their lifetimes. We don't want that year abroad to be a year off from voting, especially knowing that it might mean this person is less likely to vote after they return.
It's a cliché but we staffers also know from our own experience that living abroad, even temporarily, really is a life-changing experience. These are all young people who've had the chance to see what our country looks like from the outside, to compare how policies like healthcare work in other countries, and to feel the effects of American policy on the rest of the world. We really don't need to encourage them to vote after that: the experience itself makes them care more. We just provide the tools to help them follow through.
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