From City Hall to the White House: Why young voters count
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Summary
Young voters will have louder voices in the 2024 presidential election than ever before. What are the long-term implications of engaging and empowering young voters for the future of democracy and governance both nationally and closer to home?
Guest: Sam Dattilo, assistant director for the Mary Ellen Brandell Volunteer Center at Central Michigan University.
Summary
In this episode, Sam Dattilo, Assistant Director for the Mary Ellen Brandel Volunteer Center at Central Michigan University, discusses the importance of young voters participating in local politics. She emphasizes that local politics have a direct impact on people's daily lives, such as driving on roads, dropping kids off at school, and accessing public parks. Sam acknowledges that young people often feel disconnected from the political process, as they believe that older politicians do not understand their concerns and issues. However, she encourages young voters to engage in local politics and find candidates or organizations that align with their values. Sam also highlights the significance of local elections, as they can have a direct impact on communities and determine the direction of policies and decision-making. She advises young voters to stay informed by reading multiple sources, subscribing to reputable news outlets, and engaging with local thought leaders and nonprofits. Sam also provides information on voter registration and resources such as michigan.gov/vote and vote411.org. Overall, she emphasizes the importance of young voters participating in local politics to have a voice in their communities and shape the future.
Transcript
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction
- 01:02 Is there a generation gap in political engagement and perception?
- 05:06 Why is there a need for young people to have a voice in politics?
- 14:12 What is the local impact of voting?
- 21:22 What are challenges in finding reliable information and media literacy?
- 27:54 What’s the importance of community in fostering civic participation?
- 30:36 How do you register to vote and access nonpartisan resources for voter information?
Introduction
Sam: But you feel the impacts of who your local politicians are every time you drive down the road, every time you drop your kid off at school, every time you do or don't get to go to a public park, you are feeling local politics every day, every single day. And if you are not thinking about who those people are that are making the choices for you, then you are not getting a voice in your community.
Adam: Young voters will have a louder voice in the upcoming presidential election than ever before. Welcome to the Search Bar. I'm your host, Adam Sparkes, and on today's episode, we're talking about the critical young voter demographic with Sam Daytilo, Assistant Director for the Mary Ellen Brandel Volunteer Center at Central Michigan University. Hi Sam. Hi. Thanks for coming in to talk politics, which is really comfortable.
Sam: Very, yep. Well, we're going to talk. I actually really like it. I'm excited.
Adam: We're going to talk voting, which is as non-partisan as it should be most of the time.
Is there a generation gap in political engagement and perception?
Adam: It strikes me that right now we have an interesting election year for a lot of reasons, but it strikes me that there's probably somewhat of a demographic gap or a generation gap in how students look at this election and how folks from these generations look at the election. Is that something you run into? Do students feel a little bit, and I'll be kind of frank here too, I'll expand it. Politics in general is kind of an old man's game. Do they feel that way? I think they do.
Sam: Yeah. They definitely do. Something we hear a lot when we kind of approach these conversations with students and start to hopefully bridge that gap is asking them first, what do you care about and what do you want to see from the communities you live in? But I think where that disconnect comes from, particularly when we have candidates, the ones that we do who will be at the top of the ballot of just what do they know about what I'm facing? They couldn't possibly understand the world that I'm growing into. And yeah, that's not totally wrong. We talk a lot about what representation looks like in media and in our pop culture, but I think we're just now maybe starting in the last couple of years to have larger conversations about what representation looks like generationally in politics. It is a national news story. Every time a millennial or someone in Gen Z gets elected to any kind of office, it makes national headlines because it is so far and few between.
Adam: And millennials are, I'm a millennial.
Sam: Me too. Me too.
Adam: Look at this. I'm a millennial. But you're right. When if a millennial gets elected, we kind of,
Sam: It's a story every time. It's like, oh my gosh, good for them. Wow.
Adam: Yeah, I'm 42.
Sam: I'm 30.
Adam: So, I'm on the beginning of it. And you're on the end of it, right? Yeah. But we're both squarely adults.
Sam: Yes. And there is almost nobody even our age representing us.
Adam: So, the political discourse that is occurring, I think also sort of still treats us kind of, I don't want to say children, but I mean when we were a little bit younger, it was very infantilizing. And I think very folks who are, I think we're still mostly Gen Z as the kids that are on college campuses right now. The young people rather, I feel that they are probably feeling that same infantilization, but maybe even to a greater degree because the generation in front of them hasn't even really found a way to step up into these seats of power.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. I think, right, you need to see somebody who looks like you to first think that you could do it too. And if they're not even seeing the age bracket above them being able to accomplish this, there's no way that they're seeing it as a possibility for them. And that's not to say that young people don't do it or don't participate or haven't been heavily involved, but I think what we're seeing more from politics as a broader umbrella term for young people is more in the activism world rather than the more traditional civic engagement world.
Adam: So, we're seeing less students that want to directly get involved in the political process. I want to be a candidate, I want to be a campaign manager, et cetera.
Sam: They don't see the return on investment on their vote, and so they would rather, I think, spend their time elsewhere.
Adam: I think it's understandable, but also it strikes me that we want to make sure that we have healthy skepticism, but don't become cynics, right? Because I think when you're pushing for people to be politically or civically engaged, cynicism is sort of the enemy of doing that because it makes it easy to write yourself a pass on having productive involvement.
Sam: And it's really, really different from apathy. I think we hear a lot about there's a young person apathy when it comes to politics and voting. It's not that, and that's not true. They don't not care. They're just not caring in the same ways or doing in the same ways that historically we have seen generations above you and I participate. They're just doing it differently.
Why is there a need for young people to have a voice in politics?
Adam: And what are some things that you would say to students so that you would have them engage in order to, and again, I'm not saying we need to drive them directly into office. I mean, that's a personal decision, but it's also to maybe lose a little bit of that cynicism to make sure that we are skeptical in a healthy way, in a way that is productive for our political involvement. What are some things that these students could do in terms of maybe looking at the candidates that do exist? Is there a way for them to connect with these people who are three generations kind of ahead of them?
Sam: Yeah. I think politics is a lot of a system of not like why you show up, but why you stay. It might be one singular issue that drives you to the voting booth, and that's okay. That's I think, normal and really human to have a specific thing that you care about and want to make a difference in. So, find it, but then understand that you're also voting on a whole list of things on the ballot, and you should be informed on all of those things before you vote. And so that's the part of the why you stay, because by caring about one thing, when you learn that that one thing is deeply interconnected to everything else, and you see how that one vote has an impact on all of the other things that you maybe didn't even know about or the things you don't know about are really heavily impacting the thing that you do care about, that's where all this becomes much more ingrained in a civic identity versus just a civic action.
Adam: You start to build that sense of responsibility, which...
Sam: We know based on just political research, that by the time most 18-, 19-year-olds arrive on our doorstep, their political affiliations are actually kind of set in stone already. We're not in the business of telling people what they should believe or changing minds. They've for the most part already made up their mind around their value systems by the time they get here. What we're doing is teaching them a skillset so they can take that value system that they have and be lifelong participants in democracy because that is their right. And it has not always been incredibly clear about how to exercise that. So that's it. We're just trying to help you vote and do the thing.
Adam: Yeah, it strikes me that young people are much more politically aware than I was. My first year on a college campus was 2000, fall of 2000. This is embarrassing. Now, I don't know that I fully understood the difference between the parties in the US because I went to high school in the nineties and it was like, I don't know, Clinton was president. The internet came around. I think algo invented it, and there wasn't a lot of pressure on me, and there also wasn't a lot of information flying at me because unless I sat down every night with my dad and watched Peter Jennings, which I did occasionally, I didn't have that information. Whereas my kids are still in high school, and they have political idenities...
Sam: Inundated almost with it...
Adam: And they're challenged by other students with it and stuff too. So, I actually do agree with you, and I think it's something that bears reinforcement and repeating, and I know you and I both saying that it remains anecdotal in that statement. But yeah, I would say most of the students I meet, they're at least on a trajectory...
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, they might not know a specific name of a candidate that they align themselves with or even really what party to name, but their value systems are pretty well-informed by the time they get here. We're talking through critical thinking and how to be a full participant, but we're not saying believe this and not this. And I think naming that can be a step in the door for some students to participate because I think nobody wants to be shamed for what they believe. Nobody wants to be told that they're wrong, that their family is wrong. Your social circles and your communities that you come from are largely what shape your values and what you believe in. And nobody wants to be told that where they come from is bad. And so, I think that can be really hard for students to want to engage in if they think that they are going to walk in the door and have somebody tell them that everything they've ever known is incorrect or that they should be ashamed of it.
Adam: And we really want to make sure we're keeping all of these students involved and engaged in a way that's positive because getting you out to vote and having you want to encourage other people to vote regardless of whether you are aligned, I think is really important value that all Americans should share. We shouldn't want to be, I remember when I was a young journalist, there was always a joke that you'd get around election season where somebody would make a joke about, oh, did you tell the opposite party guys that we're moving the voting date? And they would always joke that it's the day after or whatever. And I don't think they were serious, but we don't want any form of that. I think things are polarized enough. I think we want to make sure that everyone gets out to the polls. And this demographic right now is getting increasingly important over the years. Over the last maybe two election cycles, young people have turned out in a way that they never did when I was a young person. I'm a veteran young person now.
Sam: Thank you for your service.
Adam: But young people are turning out in a way that they haven't in the past, but they're still being outperformed by the generation of these two guys that are running for office. I guess tell me in your perspective why it's really important that students kind of pick up this mantle and maybe talk them through some of the things that maybe give 'em anxiety about I am not going to vote, or things like that.
Sam: So, I guess on the, I'm not going to vote piece. I think it's really important that we are clear, and we name that not voting is a vote. By not participating, by not casting a ballot, you are participating anyway. You are allowing somebody else to speak for you because like you said, somebody else is voting. And it is oftentimes people who do not look like you or do not share your age demographic. And so, by not participating, you are still participating. So you should at least tip your weight in. And so, when we think about the importance of young people voting and getting involved and what the kind of overall participation looks like generationally, we do know that looking at Gen Z folks and millennials, that age demographic is just significantly larger than any of the others currently above them. And so, if everybody who is Gen Z or millennial participated, they would decide every single election they have the numbers, they would be able to build a community, a country, a society that works for them, that looks like them if they were to participate.
Now, I believe that we need equal participation across everybody, collaboration, that's community, that's compromise. And we don't solve problems. Again, by isolating ourselves. We solve problems when we lean in, and that includes with people who don't look like us or who don't think like us. But when you take yourself out of the game completely and you isolate your voice, then you no longer have the ability to participate. Nobody's hearing about the things that matter to you or that concern you. And for students in Michigan as a swing state, that is going to make all the difference in some rural, really small communities where sometimes the elections come down to a quite literal coin flip because it's tied. So, they flip a coin to see who gets the seat. Every single vote matters, every single one. And nationally and in some cases globally, they're looking at Michigan, they're looking at us to see what way we swing because it really is up in the air at this point.
And for young people, they can decide, they can make the difference. They can be that piece that decides how this thing is going to go and for the next couple of generations what the Supreme Court is going to look like, what Congress is going to look like. We are going to have a ton of seats up both locally and statewide as well. And we know that when decisions are made on a federal level to kick rights back to the states to decide it really matters who's in charge in the governor's office and who's in charge in our state and House of Representatives here in Michigan. That stuff really, really, really matters.
What is the local impact of voting?
Adam: There's some crazy things that happen at the local level where school boards the one that always blows my mind, because a lot of times people who lose city council elections will then go to run for a school board. They might not even have kids. They might not have any interest in that in particular, but they view it as some kind of a weird stepping stool for a big, and that's not what you want on your school board. You don't want somebody who's only there to make a bunch of noise so they can then get elected to your state senate or to the city council, and for whatever reason, you may agree or disagree with their politics, that motivation is nuts. But it happens all the time because nobody votes in these elections.
Sam: The lack of voting locally continues to be a chronic problem, especially when those local elections are happening at a different time than some of those larger elections. If you can lump them in with things like the governor's election or those larger federal elections, turnout is obviously better, but when it's a one-time appointment and they're voting on whether or not that person holds their seat still and then they run unopposed and then 14 people vote. Yeah, that's tough. But I mentioned earlier we need to see more young people running for office. Local is where you can start and do that. Nobody graduates from college and becomes the president...
Adam: But young people get elected all the time.
Sam: But they become their city commissioners. They do join school board, and that is a way to focus on the hyperlocal. That is where the most change happens, and that is where you feel the largest impacts of politics on a day-to-day basis. To be perfectly honest, we don't really feel the impacts of who is the president on a day-to-day basis. It matters a ton when you think about larger federal legislation, but a lot of the times you don't feel those impacts until a couple months or a couple of years down the road just because government runs at the speed of molasses, but you feel the impacts of who your local politicians are every time you drive down the road, every time you drop your kid off at school, every time you do or don't get to go to a public park when, specifically for CMU students, when we think about where they can and can't live, you are feeling local politics every day, every single day. And if you are not thinking about who those people are that are making the choices for you, then you are not getting a voice in your community
Adam: Preach, by the way. Yeah, we're on the same page here because that one always gets me. You really have to show up there and it's going to teach you, it's going to teach you how to think a little bit more critically about some of those bigger federal issues too, in my opinion, because...
Sam: Yeah, totally it informs up.
Adam: Yeah, it does. Because I think it's a little bit easier when you're looking at the things that are in the national, kind of...
Sam: The zeitgeist.
Adam: Yeah, the zeitgeist. I think I used that word in an episode recorded earlier, so I’m trying not to repeat myself. Look at the author in me, just trying not to be redundant.
Sam: Somebody get a thesaurus.
Adam: Thank you. What's another word for zeitgeist? Yeah, but when you're kind of in the politi-sphere that is federal, it's easy to ride along with a current that you're like, well, I agree with these people. And a lot of times we're talking about these big issues that while they may be very important, they don't necessarily impact us in a way that is equal to the level of passion that we'll have in the discourse. And that doesn't mean they're not important. I am not saying don't care about immigration if you don't live in a border state. I'm not...
Sam: But not every issue is bright, shining and sparkly.
Adam: But what's happening downtown here or wherever your town is, is probably going to affect you directly in some way. You're at least going to have to drive right past the decision.
Sam: Have you ever pulled up and realized there's a roundabout there?
Adam: Yeah. Right.
Sam: It's like, oh, oh, wow.
Adam: There was probably open comment at a meeting before they put the roundabout in that you could have talked about. And I think learning how to apply those effects in your head also teaches you to think about some of these issues that maybe you're personally disconnected from, but you start to go, who's the person that this is going to affect directly? And maybe I should hear from them, not just from the politician or not just from some talking ahead on the news. You'll learn how to do that and engage with that at a local level, and it's so important. Or just show up. I mean, go to a local government meeting.
Sam: They're also just wildly entertaining to get to see the people who are your neighbors and the guy you see at the grocery store all the time, giving public comment on something totally local and hyper-focused on your area. It's fun. It's really fun.
Adam: Yeah. You want to see some local guy talking about why the pigeons are roosting up in the party store. Absolutely. Eves, yes,
Sam: Absolutely.
Adam: Yeah. He'll give you lots of entertainment for hours there.
Sam: When we think about local, and like I said, it's at trickle up mentality with local to federal politics and learning about the process, that's where you can almost practice those civic skills because it's more likely that you're going to be able to ask questions and get to know a local candidate versus a federal candidate. I think the other piece of that is that if you are struggling to figure out where you align on an issue or you're struggling to figure out where you align on even a specific candidate, we talked earlier about the two guys at the top of the ticket are polarizing, and maybe students are feeling a little bit cynical about participating in that particular part of the election. Look to your local community thought leaders or your local nonprofits who are doing the work that you care about and ask them where they're falling on some of these issues.
If you can find somebody that maybe you align mostly with but not perfectly with, and you can get an understanding for who or what they're supporting and that your values align with theirs, maybe that can take some of the fear out of some of this or that need for every person to be perfect because you know that I care about homelessness in my city and my local shelter is aligning themselves with this cause. So, I know that that cause is probably a good place that my values would also align with. And you can also then get behind.
Adam: You kind of do the pros and cons checklist, but that's actually really interesting advice.
Sam: Yeah, I'd love to look up nonprofits to see who they are throwing in the ring for to see whether or not they're supporting certain candidates or certain bills pieces of legislation or where they're falling on Supreme Court cases. Because most of those larger nonprofits, especially those national ones like employ lawyers, I'm not a lawyer, I don't know how to read all of those legal documents, and they spend their whole lives around these certain areas of interest. And so if I know I trust this organization and I trust those thought leaders, I can lean on their expertise a little bit to know whether or not my values would align with how decisions are being made.
What are challenges in finding reliable information and media literacy?
Adam: And it's probably a conversation that you can have that's not much of a political sales pitch either. How is this candidate's stance or the declaration of this policy going to affect this specific thing that you do? Really tell me about it. And look, there's no opinion when it comes to politics in the US anymore, I think is devoid of bias. Totally. But you can get somewhere because I think one of the other things that's important to talk about here is finding ways to get good information, right? Because at the risk of also putting my opinion in here, again, one of the things I find the most frustrating, and I know students come up against this, I know that other people in my family have talked about this. "I don't know what's true." I don't think it's that hard. And maybe I spent a lot of years in media, and maybe I'm naive and I trust traditional journalists too much, but I do think people have started getting news from spaces that are harder to validate, and that becomes, you're not talking to somebody who's an expert. You're not necessarily reading quotes from the expert. You're just kind of getting these opinions and these really light attributions. And it seems like it's tough, but it's also another reason because what we're talking about here is trying to get people to vote and participate to not participate because you start to feel like the truth is so hard to get to whose facts...
Sam: Mistrust in the system and everything.
Adam: What would your advice be for folks that are trying to figure out a way to pick away around that to kind of feel like you're getting solid information when you're reading about an issue or a topic, where should they go? How do they know when something is crap? Frankly?
Sam: Yeah. I would not go to X formerly known as Twitter. I would stop reading just the headline of one article that you saw one time on Facebook. It takes work and the time and the space that people have to give to these conversations and this type of consistent education in a 24-hour media cycle is not an easy ask of people. We are asking everyone to become media experts in this landscape because there are opinions about everything. And to feel like you are a fully informed person will last about 14 hours before the next things happens that you also then have to update yourself on. So, I would say that you should read sources from a couple of different points of view. There are also a handful of really great email listservs you can subscribe to that will dump just some quick pieces of information to your inbox every morning that you can listen to.
NPR has a really great first thing in the morning podcast that's like eight minutes long that you can listen to while you get ready in the morning. That will give you just kind of an overview of the day, and then you can kind of pick the pieces that are really salient to you that you want to learn more about if it feels kind of overwhelming. Also, I think this is maybe the opposite of what you're looking for, but disengage sometimes because when you are oversaturating yourself with this information, I think when it becomes really convoluted, so be responsible with your media consumption, but then also know that it's sometimes it's okay to tap out and know that you're not the expert. You're not going to solve hunger or Middle East peace this afternoon, and that's okay.
Adam: Yeah. Well, you need to protect yourself sometimes too. It can be stressful. You don't want to give yourself undue anxiety because you're trying to figure all of this stuff out.
Sam: Absolutely.
Adam: And I think I got a couple pieces of advice when I was in journalism school that have stuck with me for a long time. If people are yelling, it's not news shut it off.
Sam: A hundred percent.
Adam: If they are yelling, shut it off.
Sam: If it's prime time. It's also not news.
Adam: I would expand that and tell me how you feel about this. If I don't watch news anymore, I feel like if I'm watching it, it's the entertainment value that's needed for it to be on cable news at this point. Totally is. So supersedes the informational value at this point that I've kind of shut that off. The only time I turn on CNN or something of the equivalent is on election night just to see the results coming up. That's literally it.
Sam: We've gamified and given politics, this sports culture of this winners and losers bracket, and that's what they're trying to do during those primetime spots. It's meant to be entertaining because they don't want you to shut it off. And that doesn't mean, right, like you said, never engaged. There are times when the national news is a really important and necessary platform for us all to tune into, but local news is so good. Subscribe to a newspaper of your choosing.
Adam: Say the word with the S again.
Sam: Subscribe.
Adam: Yeah. I'm going to interject one more time on you ready for this one? There's a reason that newspapers that still have subscription costs have a lot of value, and it's because...
Sam: You mean a paywall?
Adam: It's not always a negative
Sam: Is that a dirty word?
Adam: I'm going to use the two biggest examples.
Sam: It might mean they're paying their journalists.
Adam: They're paying their journalists, and their subscribers are what's keeping the doors open on the place. Totally. If you're the Wall Street Journal and you're the New York Times, they have opposed opinions pages. Generally speaking, one's more left and one is more, right? If you're a CMU student, I think you have a free Wall Street Journal subscription. You do if you, alright, so take the opinions page out. Don't read any columns. You don't have to read any columns. Generally speaking, you're going to find pretty similar-ish coverage in both of these papers on a national level. So the advice I always give people is like, give a skim through the article on both. And here's the thing, if the issue's popping up, and this is not a universal statement, these papers, they're still fallibility and anything that's run by people and stuff like that, but if you're hearing some news or something that's wild and it's nuts and it's not showing up in either one of these places, it's probably not real news.
Sam: Totally.
Adam: They are massive entities that cover stuff all over the place, and generally speaking, you're going to find some consistency in their coverage and some consistency in who their experts are. You don't have to totally agree with that, but I think it's a good place to start. If you feel totally lost, read it. Don't watch it.
Sam: Agreed. Agreed. Also, watch CSPAN. It's fun. It's really fun.
Adam: It can be fun sometimes it's like watching paint dry though.
Sam: Oh, I love it. Every time.
What’s the importance of community in fostering civic participation?
Adam: So, if we're keeping people informed and everything, we want to keep them motivated. I think one of those motivations should be community, having a local community, having an American community that has value and that we want to support, right?
Sam: Yeah. So, there is a researcher whose name is Robert Putnam, and he wrote this book called Bowling Alone. And really what the entire premise of this research is, is that when people were more involved in bowling leagues or their school PTAs or they joined clubs, that there were higher rates of civic participation. That there was a correlation between these two things. You'll often call here, it called or referred to as third places we have home, we have work, but where is your third place? Because your third place is where you're going to spend the time with people that you've chosen to spend time with, not people that you have to spend time with, right? Your coworkers, your family,
And so, these are your friends and you're learning about what they care about and what their immediate needs are. It starts to erode that, not in my backyard mentality, because then your entire community becomes your backyard, not just your physical property. And so, this loss of third places and this loss of monoculture have both played a role according to Putnam in this erosion of civic participation. And so, when we think about COVID and it driving us into more isolation and spending more time online, the internet has become our third place in a lot of cases. So, when we ask people to do the work of being able to spot misinformation, that can be really hard because that third place, they've started to view as their community and their friends, and nobody thinks their community or their friend is going to lie to them. So, we have to have some compassion around this lack of maybe media literacy that we're seeing because that's people's friends. That's where they spend their time. And so, I think as we come out of the pandemic and as we are encouraging, especially here our students to really be involved and to do things in person and in my world, go volunteer, it leads directly to civic participation and positive civic outcomes because they are broadening their perspectives and they're seeing beyond themselves.
Adam: I wish we could treat people online like that so that we could better understand them, but probably we won't. So maybe finding that third space to have that political conversation is a good one.
Sam: Join something.
Adam: Absolutely.
Sam: Join something.
How do you register to vote and access nonpartisan resources for voter information?
Adam: And speaking of join things, how can I join a group of registered voters if I am not already? How do we do that? What should I do? How do I get involved?
Sam: So, if you are a Michigan resident who is over the age of 18 and you're not currently in prison, you can go to michigan.gov/vote and you can register to vote online all the time. If it is within 14 days in an election that you want to participate in, you do have to register in person with your local clerk. If you are not a registered or not interested in being a registered voter in Michigan, you can go to vote.org and you can find information on each individual state. But something that's really cool that I don't think a ton of Michigan residents even really know is a thing that passed. Now, state of Michigan registered voters actually get registered at the age of 16 automatically when they get their driver's license. So, there are lots of people who are registered who don't even know and then don't participate in the election because they don't know that they can.
So, when you get your driver's license down in the state of Michigan, you automatically get registered unless you opt out, don't opt out, don't opt out. You just have to quite literally do nothing. And then they register you. So, you can also check your voter registration status if you think this might be you at michigan.gov/vote. And then you can also register to vote on election day as well at your clerk's office if you've waited and then you decide on election day that you'd like to participate, you can write up until the day of. And then as you're kind of looking at whether you want to support a certain candidate or a certain initiative, vote411.org is a really, really amazing nonpartisan resource put together by the League of Women Voters where they reach out to candidates both nationally and locally, and ask them a set of questions. They ask every candidate the same questions so that you can see how folks on both sides of the IL are answering these questions to see which answer you most closely align with. You can also download copies of a sample ballot so you can fill it out and bring it with you to the voting booth, like a cheat sheet so that you know exactly how you want to vote once you get in there, if that's something you're a little bit nervous about.
Adam: You want to get out of there fast sometimes too.
Sam: Yeah. Or if you don't do that ahead of time, bring your phone with you and you can look things up as you're sitting there. Nobody's timing you. And so, there are a ton of really good resources through Vote four on one. The League of Women Voters does a really excellent job of making sure that is a really comprehensive and nonpartisan resource for voters.
Adam: Awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you. I'm already registered to vote, but if I wasn't
Sam: Now you would.
Adam: I would register at the clerk's office and they're very friendly, at least here.
Sam: That's great. Thank you so much.
Adam: Thanks, Sam. Thanks for coming in. Of course. It was a pleasure.
Sam: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Thank you.
Adam: Thanks for stopping by The Search Bar. Make sure that you like and subscribe so that you never have to search for another episode.