How to Increase the Youth Vote in the Democratic Party of New Mexico

In discussions with Democrats across the state, I've heard a consistent  concern over the increasing number of young voters registering without any party affiliation and the absence of youth in the party organization. On Tuesday I was in Deming meeting with the County Chairs and Vice-Chairs of Luna, Grant and Sierra counties and they put the question to me; "how can we get more youth involved in the party?"

We talked about several ideas but nothing really concrete. However,  yesterday, looking at the number of DTS voters in each county and our state party's delegate selection plan for 2008 Democratic National Convention, I came up with one  possible solution: let the youth vote in our caucus.

Youth who will be 18 years of age, on or by November 4th, 2008 and who registerer as a Democrat before the caucus on Feb. 5th, 2008, should be allowed to vote and have that vote counted in the Democratic Party of New Mexico's Presidential caucus. This would allow anyone born before November 4th, 1990 and after Feb 5th, 1990--mostly high school seniors, (current juniors) to become active in the party.

However, what would be even better, would be if we could allow students 16 years of age and older participate in the caucus as well, since this would allow students in their second year of high school to participate in two election cycles before graduating, the second being 2010.

Interestingly, our Delegate Selection Plan for 2008 actually provides for 2 Youth delegates to the national convention. If we have Youth Delegates in the plan, it would seem only fair that we allow youth participation in our caucus.

Comments

[Westside Voter]

Hey Gideon, I was looking at the selection plan and asked for clarification that the plan only outlines "goals" of what the affirmative action committee must "try" to meet as far as delegates. At the YDNM convention on Sunday, April 29th I asked Matt F. and Brian Colon and others chimed in. They all agreed that the 2 Youth Delegates that the plan says it apportions for are not exactly that... see I thought in order to boost the youth participation we as Young Dems would have our own meeting to elect the 2 delegates, however, the way it stands is that if two people under the age of 36 get elected at any point in the process than the party has met the "goal" of two youth delegates! I think that sucks because in theory with the appointments of elected officers they will have already met this "goal". I wish that the YD's could have their own meeting of those who participate in the caucus to elect their representation.

[Gideon]

That's really interesting considering that the delegate selection plan states the following:

"we used the age range of 17-30, which was set forth in a Lake Snell Perry battleground study commissioned by Young Voter Strategies. Since we did not have Census data readily available, we determined the raw number of Democrats who are
now between the ages 20-32 who voted in the 2004 presidential election in New Mexico. There were approximately 50,000. We divided this number by the statewide voting population of approximately 1.2 million and determined that 4 percent of our state delegation should be young voters."

So they used a study's guideline for youth which defined the age range as 17-30 years old and then they selected Democrats age 20-32 who voted in 2004 in determining their representation in the delegation.

1. What about 18 year olds who voted in 2004 and who voted in 2006? Why wouldn't their participation rates be included in the calculation?

2. If the guidelines used were for ages 20-32, how can they allow individuals older than 32 to be "youth" delegates?