Thousands of students are expected to walk out of classes today to go to the polls

Authored by cnbc.com and submitted by GloomyReddit

Select schools have taken steps towards making voting easier. For instance, several school districts in Oklahoma and North Carolina are closed for election day. Some colleges, like the University of Montana, have cancelled classes in order to help students get to the polls. In many cases, polls are open at 7 a.m., theoretically giving students enough time to vote before classes begin.

But according to organizers, the walkout is about more than just voter turnout.

"In addition to ensuring young people show up to the polls in record numbers, the goal of Walkout to Vote is to send a message to politicians the country that young people are unified in our demand for change and united across issues, organizations and communities," Katie Eder, founder of the Future Coalition, tells CNBC Make It.

Eder, 19, graduated from high school in June and is taking a gap year to "focus on changing the country" before attending Stanford.

This latest demonstration is indicative of the heightened political participation of young people today. A survey of over 2,000 people from the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics found that an unprecedented 40 percent of Americans under the age of 30 say they will definitely vote in the upcoming elections, signaling a record turnout for this year's midterms.

Among these young people, Harvard found that just 26 percent approve of President Donald Trump, while 39 percent support democratic socialism, 56 percent support a federal jobs guarantee and 56 percent support free community college and free four-year college for students from families that make less than $125,000 per year.

Daphne Frias, a 20-year-old SUNY student and organizer of the New York City Walkout to Vote, tells CNBC Make It that political activism is a unifying force among young people.

"For this generation, it has been hard not to become disillusioned with the state of our country and its politics," Frias says over email. "Most of us are coming of age in a time of a political sensory overload, but that does not stop us from realizing that we are unhappy with the way our country is going. We've marched and we've rallied and that made people listen."

TaijiInstitute on November 6th, 2018 at 16:02 UTC »

I just voted before going to the lab. It was...odd. There was a bit of confusion about me not being in their system because I registered pretty recently, but that was ok and just an honest mistake. It also meant I had to do a provisional ballot. But then.... my form was pre filled out on the last page. It wasn’t that important of a page, just some stuff about the charter for the little section of town I live in or whatever, but someone had already filled in the bubbles on that page. To their credit when I told them I was brought a new final page to fill in. But still, how did it get filled in ahead of time? And did other people just think “whatever” and go with it? Again, they weren’t big items and I only changed one on my fresh page, but it was odd.

Method__Man on November 6th, 2018 at 16:00 UTC »

Why is there not a law built in that EVERYONE has time off to vote, especially students who are the mercy of other forces.

RG450 on November 6th, 2018 at 15:54 UTC »

I'm pretty disappointed that my university didn't schedule a day off for election day.

So I just canceled my classes and told my students that their homework was to go and vote.