“I’ve always wanted to vote and help pick the president,” says Alex Salas, an 18-year-old senior at Golden Valley High School in Merced. “It means a lot to me and I’m excited to be able to pick the person that I believe should run our country.”
Salas is a member of the city’s Youth Council, a youth counterpart to the Merced City Council. He says that while he’s disappointed with the Republican win, he still believes in the importance of exercising his right to vote.
Part of the problem is indifference, said 16-year-old Cheng Vang, a student at Buhach Colony High School in Atwater. While this election cycle has been full of turmoil and drama, many of his friends and classmates don’t regularly follow politics and therefore don’t feel a personal connection to any of the issues on the ballot.
If the voting age were lowered to 16, however, Vang said youth would be more likely to pay attention and start forming consistent voting habits.
“It’s really important that the communities who are disenfranchised and have been ignored for so long, turn out and vote. They have power and they can help make a change,” said Brenda Gutierrez, organizing director of Associated Students of University of California, Merced (ASUCM).
The 20-year-old university student spent a majority of her summer going door-to-door in Merced County to help spread the word about several ballot measures and campaigns this year. Her work was part of the ASUCM external office “We Vote” program, a statewide initiative across the UC campuses aimed at getting students more involved in elections.
I was never fond of politics or the government, because I was under the impression that my vote didn’t matter. My grandfather used to tell me conspiracy theories about how every election was rigged. I refused to be part of a corrupt system.
Those words held extreme significance for me on Election Day. They restored my ideals and filled my mind as I approached my polling place: “It is our duty to fight."
Latinos are at the epicenter of the swirling, unpredictable 2016 presidential campaign. From Donald Trump’s polarizing comments about Mexican immigrants to Hilary Clinton’s recent clumsy attempt to identify with Hispanic grandmothers, Latinos are either being blamed for ruining the country or being courted as voters like never before.
While some Republicans like Donald Trump call for mass deportations, the Democratic side has taken much more favorable stances towards immigration reform.
If I could vote this election I would vote for Prop 1 because it saves our water and our marine animals. I would also vote for Measure T because all sections of Merced should have a say in this city. As of now, everything is one sided because the city council are all from the non-ghetto side of Merced.
“The main idea was to try to do for civic engagement what Earth Day did for the environment, and really create one positive, fun, exciting day where everybody could plug in, in whatever way was easiest for them,” says Jessica Reeves, the vice president of partnerships at Voto Latino, one of the organizations involved in starting National Voter Registration Day (NVRD).
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