It has already been greatly stated that Barack Obama is a big hit among the youth vote. "He wins in the 18-24 group!" "He wins in the 18-21 group." The issue is that in the Maryland Primary Tuesday, it will be the 17-24 or 17-21 due to a very brave young woman that wasn't going to get her chance to vote in the primary taken away from her.
Sarah Boltuck's senior year at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda was transformed by a rejection letter -- not from a college, but from the Montgomery County Board of Elections.
It said she could not vote in the February primary because she was not yet 18. Boltuck thought differently. She fought it all the way to the state elections board and the attorney general's office, and she won.
Last month, Boltuck, along with her father and a sympathetic state senator, persuaded Maryland's top legal minds to restore the right of suffrage to at least 50,000 teens who will turn 18 between the Feb. 12 primary and the Nov. 4 election.
I hope those working the Maryland race are getting this out to the impact 17-year-olds, especially that we are talking about a group of up to 50,000 extra voters!!
I think this is amazing and exactly the right thing to do. Apparently Virginia also allows 17-year-olds that will be 18 by the time of the general election to also cast votes in the primary, but the article doesn't really discuss how.
We need to get the word out on this. More from the article.
The focus now is to spread the word and register as many teens as possible by tomorrow's deadline.
About 8,000 Marylanders who will turn 18 by Election Day have registered to vote, half of them in the past month, according to state election officials. Letters have gone out to everyone who registered under the old rules to tell them they can now vote in the primary. Census data suggest upwards of 50,000 Maryland residents fall in the nine-month age range.
An informal survey of local school systems a few examples of coordinated effort. High schools in St. Mary's County distributed literature on the new rules in 12th-grade social studies classes. Democratic and Republican clubs in Calvert County visited each high school at lunchtime to register eligible 17-year-olds. At Einstein High School in Montgomery County, student Democrats registered 85 students in a single day by taking forms to English classes. Elly Shaw-Belblidia, a Democratic volunteer, led a team that visited several other Montgomery schools.
"It's frustrating," she said, "that we have so little time."
Get the word out folks!!