Brooks: Young Minnesotans, register to vote like your future depends on it

If you want to feel good about America, spend time with the people who will be running this place before long.

High School Voter Registration Week kicks off in Minneapolis on Monday, April 28. Minnesota now allows 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister to vote, so for the next week, teens will be out in the halls of their high schools, getting each other ready to vote like their future depends on it.

Their future. Our bragging rights.

Minnesota, long the state with the nation’s highest voter turnout, lost that title to Wisconsin in 2024. The final tally came in earlier this month: 76.35% of Minnesota’s voting-eligible population cast ballots, only to be edged out by 76.64% of Wisconsin.

But Minnesota’s youngest voters didn’t let us down. The state boasted the nation’s highest turnout of under-30 voters. That number includes 60% of eligible 18- and 19-year-olds who voted in the first general election since the state gave them a jump-start on their voter registration paperwork.

Meanwhile, only 29% of the youngest voters in Oklahoma cast their first vote.

“Voting is a cumbersome process for some,” said Jake Wesson, who took a week out of his senior year last year to volunteer for Minneapolis’ first high school preregistration drive with his twin brother, Drew. “When you have exams coming up and homework, you don’t want to go through the bureaucracy.”

The brothers, now 19 and freshmen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, threw themselves into civic engagement and local government long before they could vote. They served as election judge trainees. They were high school pages at the Minnesota Legislature. Jake served as a student representative to the Minneapolis school board. Drew was part of the search committee for the new Minneapolis school superintendent. Both served as interns — “twinterns,” the district dubbed them — at Minneapolis Public Schools.

And during the first High School Voter Registration Week last year, the Wessons staffed tables in the halls of Washburn High School, helping their classmates make a plan to vote.

“I think people don’t realize how involved youth want to be,” Drew said. “Youth are knowledgeable about issues happening in our world. But the way systems are set up don’t really encourage youth participation.”

Minnesotans must be registered before they can vote. The state tries to make the process painless — you can register online, on paper or in-person on Election Day. Teens who preregister are automatically registered to vote on their 18th birthday.

It turns out, making a plan to vote leads to voting. A 2016 study in the American Journal of Political Science found that preregistration increased young voter turnout — a statistic that held true for both young Democrats and young Republicans.

There were 26,000 Minneapolis residents between the ages of 15 and 19 in the 2020 census. There are some interesting elections coming up. They won’t want to miss this.

Most states make an effort to encourage young voters. Minnesota is one of 18 that allow 16-year-olds to preregister to vote. Four more allow 17-year-olds to do so. Twenty-two states allow teens to put in their paperwork if they’ll turn 18 before the next election — which, if it’s a general election, allows many 16-year-olds to preregister anyway.

Voting used to be something America encouraged.

That was then, this is the Trump administration.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, passed the U.S. House in April. The legislation, which is likely to get filibustered into oblivion in the Senate, would have required voters to jump through elaborate paperwork hoops to prove their worthiness to vote.

The SAVE Act seeks to prevent noncitizens from voting — something that almost never happens — even if it means disenfranchising millions upon millions of actual citizens.

The bill would require “documentary proof of United States citizenship.” Documents that will be a particular pain in the neck for the youngest voters, the oldest voters and the 80% of married women who have taken their husband’s name.

If this bill became law, Americans wouldn’t be preregistering each other to vote in the high school hallways. They’d be scrambling for a REAL ID — something 60% of Minnesotans still don’t have. Or a passport, which half of Americans don’t have, either. Americans would be scrambling to dig out or get duplicates of birth certificates or marriage certificates or proof of military service that also lists their country of birth.

All to prove what election officials can prove right now — that voter fraud is vanishingly rare and swiftly caught and punished.

Which leaves us with the joy of watching thousands of Minnesota teens discover that voting is every eligible citizen’s right. Not a little treat controlled by the party in power.