A youth-led campaign to get more young people registered to vote has proven to be successful with more than one and a half million registering since the election was called.
The Give An X campaign jointly set up by My Life My Say, #IWill and Shape History aimed to get more young people registered to vote before the deadline of 18th of June.
The day provided to be successful with 632,863 people registering on deadline day, more than half of which were between the ages of 18-34, just shy of the record 659,666 on the 2019 election’s deadline.
#IWill’s Policy and Public Affairs Officer George Fielding said: “Before the campaign there were 4.3 million young people who were not on the electoral register, enough to swing the election who are locked out of the democratic debate.
“Unless we are able to get more young people in the system, we can’t hold politicians to account.
“Every policy is a young person’s policy.”
The divide between young and old was increasingly stark with data in 2022 showing 40% of people between 18-19 and 33% of 20-24-year-olds were not on the electoral register compared to just 4% of those aged 65 and over.
The three campaign partners teamed up with different brands such as Ben&Jerry’s, Lime-Bikes and Tinder in order to try and increase participation in the young.
The campaign used a Youth-Steering Group which were ten young people from across the country who were not registered to vote before the campaign began to help decide the strategy in trying to get more young people registered to vote before the deadline.
Shape History’s Associate Strategy Director Jack Maycock said: “The campaign was to bring politics to people not people to politics.
“The fact that it was youth-led with the Youth Steering Group deciding how the campaign was conducted made sure that the campaign kept reminding young people that what you care about is tied to politics and that politics matters.”
He mentioned on a fieldwork trip conducted with a thousand young people between 18-24 conducted between the 12-13th of April when asked whether or not politicians cared for them or not, three-quarters said that they didn’t.
Maycock added: “There are three main sentiments that come up when asking why young people don’t vote: they don’t know enough about politics in order to vote, they don’t any political party sentiment and they believe that my vote won’t change anything.
“We need more active listening from politicians rather than using politicians for cheap PR.”
For more information about the Give An X campaign, visit https://www.giveanx.org/
Featured Image Credit: Give An X
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