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By Clair Whitmer

NANTES, France – Now that 2008 is behind us, some pundits are saying it’s safe to start ignoring youth voters again. After all young people’s attention spans are too short to show up to the polls two elections in a row, right?

Wrong.

At Youth Vote Overseas (YVO) https:yvo.overseasvotefoundation.org, we don’t believe that. From where we sit, American young people seem to be becoming more engaged every year and not just with domestic politics, but with issues on a worldwide scale. Why does it look this way to us?  Partly because more American students than ever before are leaving to study abroad.

YVO is a nonprofit, nonpartisan website created for one reason: to help American overseas citizens, aged 18-29, vote. We provide online tools to help them fill out their registration forms; give them the address where to mail them; and help them figure out what to do if their ballot doesn’t arrive in time. That sounds simple.

It’s not.

Our users come from all 50 states, each of which has different electoral deadlines and regulations – some of them obscure and ludicrous like requiring a ballot returned from overseas to be notarized. Imagine being an 18-year-old exchange student in China trying to track down an American notary so you can vote for the first time. And what if you didn’t know about a state-specific registration requirement and you’re waiting for your ballot that never comes because you didn’t fulfill the registration requirements and then it’s too late and you’ve missed the first election of your adult life? The sad reality is that these young people are less likely to vote in the next election too, even if they’ve returned home by then.

YVO’s point and purpose is to prevent that from happening. We launched in June 2008; we, and our parent website, the OVF at http://www.overseasvotefoundation.org, made it a lot easier for 49,000 American voters aged 18-29 and living in some 180 countries to vote in the federal election of November 2008.   It can literally take weeks, even months, to complete the process of voting if you live overseas. You’ve got to really want to vote. That’s 49,000 young people who really wanted their voices to be heard. But we think we’ve only reached a small portion of those who will want to vote in future. That’s why OVF is devoting a good portion of our resources to strengthening our YVO program for 2010. We don’t think the growth in the number of young voters in 2008 was only about the popularity of then-candidate Barack Obama. Of course, lots of people wanted to participate in what we all understood to be an historic election. Yet the 2008 youth vote wasn’t a one-time spike, but part of a shift. We base this belief on these facts.

First, as the Census Bureau reported in July: “voters 18 to 24 were the only age group to show a statistically significant increase in turnout, reaching 49 percent in 2008 compared with 47 percent in 2004.”

That was widely reported.

Less widely reported is that this increase started in 2004 and continued in the 2006 mid-term election. We know this thanks to research from http://www.civicyouth.org/?page_id=212. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) published this report in cooperation with Rock the Vote.

At YVO, we also expect a lot more students to go abroad.

The Institute of International Education, a nonprofit cultural exchange organization that tracks international enrollment, reported that the number of American students studying abroad was up 8 percent in school year 2006-07 over the previous year, but up 150 percent over 1996.

Crisis or none, we expect this trend to continue over the long-term, especially if the legislature approves the Senator Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act of 2009 to award grants to U.S. students who pick “nontraditional” study abroad destinations (The House has already approved the Act as a rider to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act; the Senate version of the bill is still in committee). Furthermore, although the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t track Americans living overseas, we’ve heard unofficially that more fresh college graduates are job-hunting overseas, prompted by high unemployment rates at home.

Clearly, this leads to the conclusion that there will be more young Americans living abroad needing our services.

More importantly, we think it will mean a coming generation of citizens who, by virtue of having lived overseas, will have a better understanding of their own country: how Americans and American policy are seen in other nations; how other countries handle issues like health care; and how your nationality is more than your passport, but who you are, in your head and your heart.   It’s when you leave home that you figure out why there’s no place like it.

After that, voting doesn’t feel like a duty; it feels like a connection to what you love.

Clair Whitmer spent a year studying abroad in Paris, and has lived  continuously abroad since 2004. She is currently a journalist and has written for organizations like the Youth News Service. While she is not a member of  “the next generation”, Clair Whitmer does valuable work helping “the next generation” vote as the Director of Voter Outreach for the Overseas Vote Foundation.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.