THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 6, 1996 TAG: 9605040001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
The United States is the oldest constitutional democracy.
But Americans are notorious for not voting.
Kids Voting USA, which is coming soon to Hampton Roads (starting in Norfolk and Virginia Beach), aims to change that. The grass-roots, nonpartisan, nonprofit voter-education project already has had an impact around the nation: The number of adults voting in elections has increased by an average 3 percent in the jurisdictions where Kids Voting USA has taken root. In some places, participation in elections has leaped 9 percent.
Most U.S. elections - federal, state and local - are decided by a small minority of the adults who could have voted if they had registered to vote and showed up at the polls.
Count on it: Only a minority of the potential voters in Hampton Roads who could vote in tomorrow's local elections will cast ballots. Turnouts will be paltry. Candidates elected to city councils and school boards tomorrow will be the choice of a minority of a minority.
Not good. Perhaps the time will come when presidents, governors, members of Congress, state legislators and local officials truly will be ``the people's choice'' because most Americans - say, 90 percent - who can vote will vote. Kids Voting USA surely will have earned a share of the credit if that day dawns.
Kids Voting Virginia, created by volunteers and funded privately (as is Kids Voting USA), aspires to involve 40,000 South Hampton Roads schoolchildren in the November 1996 election. Kids Voting is basic civics for children from kindergarten through 12th grade.
In the nonpartisan Kids Voting curriculum, children learn the importance of voting and how to research issues and candidates. All of Norfolk's 52 public schools will teach the Kids Voting curriculum. Virginia Beach will field test the program in five public schools. On May 29, 110 schoolteachers will be trained to use the curriculum by a Kids Voting USA education expert.
Kids Voting USA was founded by three Arizona businessmen who were amazed by the near-90 percent turnout of the electorate in Costa Rican elections - the highest voting rate among Western democracies. Costa Rican schoolchildren discuss candidates and election issues in the classroom, follow election-campaign news and vote alongside their parents. They don't actually elect candidates, but their votes are tallied and reported along with official voting totals.
In 1994, 2.3 million U.S. schoolchildren in 20 states and the District of Columbia were involved in Kids Voting. Each child in the program is asked to talk with a parent or guardian about candidates and issues. Children from kindergarten through eighth grade must be accompanied to the polls by at least one registered voter in order to be allowed to vote in the parallel Kids Voting election. That's how Kids Voting Virginia will work in Norfolk and Virginia Beach in the November 1996 election.
Kids Voting is motherhood and apple pie, ``Yankee Doodle Dandy,'' ``America the Beautiful'' and the national anthem. Only the churlish could disapprove.
There are many reasons why so many Americans don't vote. We are a transient people, always moving on, as poet Stephen Vincent Benet said. Many states long discouraged voting - in the South with terror and the poll tax and throughout America by creating other obstacles to voter registration. Many Americans scorn politics either as a game rigged by the big boys and insiders against everybody else or as so irrelevant to the daily existence of ordinary people that there's no point in paying attention. The folk wisdom is that politicians can't be trusted.
The U.S. voting-age population totaled 193,650,000 in 1994. Thirty-six percent voted, electing governors and other state officials and members of Congress. Virginia did a mite better: Of 4.967,000 voting-age Virginians, 38.4 percent cast ballots.
But the voting pattern may be about to change for the better, at least a little. The national ``motor voter'' law signed by President Clinton has eased registration nationwide - and millions of unregistered Americans are registering. The nonpartisan, nonprofit Project Vote Smart (telephone: 1-800-622-SMART, Internet: gopher gopher.neu.edu) is providing instantaneous information to journalists, political scientists and voters generally about voter registration and participation in elections, elected officials' voting records and sources of campaign funding and other valuable data. Kids Voting USA will acquaint successive generations with the basic rituals of citizenship in a democratic society and then guide them through the rituals.
Kids Voting USA should boost not only voting totals over time but also enhance voters' understanding of issues; that could lead to more-intelligent voting by more people. If greater and greater percentages of grown-up Americans vote in the future, it will be in part because little children have led them. by CNB