Get Voting

In the recent year the numbers have shown that less and less young adults are exercising their right to vote. We believe this is because of confusing, lengthy and complex information that is currently available for young voters. We hope to change this, bring awareness to this problem, and contribute ourselves by making a workshop/presentation for young people in our area. We want young people to be able to express their opinions on this country's policies and leaders, the opportunity to choose who they want to represent them, and a say on important issues that affect them.

Our Social Issue

In light of the current presidential elections happening in the USA and Ireland, voting has been a very prominent topic. As young adults, who will be legally allowed to vote in two years, we felt a lack of resources that informed us about voting. This includes what we are voting for, why it is important to vote and how to properly vote. The resources we could find had lengthy, complex language and information that was inconsistent. We hope to change this problem by creating resources for young people in our area that display this necessary information in a fun, interactive and comprehensible way. It will be designed for young people by young people. Ultimately we hope to increase the number of young people that are voting by giving the required information and tools to make the transition to voting as easy and comfortable as possible.

Why We Chose It

We chose to address the absence of voting in Ireland because of the worrying lack of information or attention young people were paying to politics in Ireland and as young people who would be voting in under two years we were shocked with the lack of education we had been given on voting and politics in general. After further research we found some worrying statistics from the 2020 general election. The turnout for 18-24 year old's was marginally the lowest and 40% of young people said they do not care about politics whatsoever.

Our Goal

Our big idea is to implement political education into schools all around Ireland to increase democratic engagement in the younger generation. Lower turnout in elections is a continuous problem for Ireland's younger demographic, meaning their opinions and views are not being represented politically, and others are making decisions about their future. We want to make political education more accessible for younger generations through implementing it into the curriculum in schools. We have designed a curriculum for TY students on political education to hopefully be used in schools across Ireland.

Our Innovative Action

We have taken many actions throughout working on our project this year. We undertook projects that directly targeted implementing voter and political education into schools. We held a discussion with 5th and 6th years with four politicians from our constituency who were running in the upcoming election. We then held a whole school mock election to teach students how to properly engage in democracy and get them talking about politics. Most recently we designed and wrote a voting and political TY module to be implemented into schools across the country as exposure to voting for young people.

Our Impact

Our ‘Get Voting’ team’s goal was to educate young people. We took time to go through the voting system and ensure students understood how to vote properly. It was evidently effective when the mock election was held in our school and only a small amount of votes were spoiled. 75% of our student body voted. Two weeks before the general election, we went to sixth year classes to teach them how to register to vote in the election. This increased the number of people voting as many of them registered and it affected young voting turnout in our constituency