True or false? When more young people register to vote, turnout rates among those who register will go down.

We dug into the data to find out

I’ll admit it. I have a big pet peeve. It’s when people tell me that low levels of voter registration have no relationship to low levels of youth turnout. They believe increasing youth registration has no chance of increasing turnout because unregistered youth are inherently unmotivated and therefore won’t turn out, whether we help them register or not.

The suggestion is that working to increase registration rates is useless, that unregistered young people are simply uninterested. I try to be polite. I smile. I say things like, “well, maybe.” I say, “that’s one possibility but it’s also possible that registration is harder for young people, and that consistently welcoming them into our democracy will increase (or at least have no impact on) turnout among those who are registered.”

In any case, don’t we need to study real data to find out? Isn’t lowering the barrier to registration and voting among young people an unalloyed good? Shouldn’t a healthy democracy do everything it can to ensure everyone can use their voice to create the change they want to see?

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Until now, I haven’t had the data to push back as hard as I would like. But now I’ve dug into the data and I’m confident: It’s wrong to assume that increasing registration rates for the youngest voters will lead to lower levels of turnout among newly-registered 18-year-olds.

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Here’s what we did. We looked at state voter files from New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. For each county in each state, we calculated registration rates for 18-year-olds and turnout rates among those who were registered in the 2024 election.

And here’s what we found: In all three states, counties with higher registration rates for 18-year-olds tended to have higher turnout rates among those 18-year-olds who were registered. Not lower. Below is our chart with it all plotted out. See how the “regression line” for each state is going up and not down? If the skeptics were right, we’d expect to see that line going down, with turnout among registered 18-year-olds declining as registration rates increase.

There could be many factors at play in these outcomes, such as the extent of organizing, education, and mobilization relating to the election; or background factors like income, educational attainment in the community, quality of civics education in area schools, racial disparities, and whether English is spoken in the home. But whatever combination of factors is at play, it’s hard to look at this chart and say there’s nothing that can be done to increase youth turnout. Of course there is.

Now I’ll give the skeptics this: the chart doesn’t track changes over time. It doesn’t prove that increasing youth registration will definitely increase turnout among those registered. Nor does the chart show that simply having more forms completed, without more robust interventions like peer-to-peer voter registration drives, quality civics education, or other broader engagement efforts, will lead to higher turnout among those registered.

But I hope the skeptics will do a double take and consider: Maybe it is not that there’s nothing to be done. Maybe more registered voters in a community’s voter file means that more people are getting election information from candidates and campaigns, and maybe this prompts more discussions that lead to higher turnout. Maybe communities with greater levels of civic engagement overall have higher levels of both registration and turnout so that the best interventions should include more than just completing forms. Maybe there are factors unrelated to registration that cause the correlation.

But whatever it is, the next time you hear a skeptic saying that higher levels of registration will inevitably be offset by lower turnout, it’s ok to push back.

What if, instead of writing off the millions of unregistered youth, we instead get off the sidelines and do our best to increase both registration and turnout and to develop the most effective ways to do both together.

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