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The responsibility to vote extends beyond the Presidential election

It’s 2016, and that means there’s a presidential election happening in November. Even at Princeton, notorious for our lack of civic engagement compared to the other Ivy League institutions, the competition for the next President is apparent.

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On the Democratic side, there are student groups for both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, there has been heated debate. There have been an inordinate number of Prince articles about Trump (I have to confess to writing one of them myself). Our own Ted Cruz ’92 has also generated a considerable amount of interest, with a few articles and recently a controversial poster campaign denouncing his candidacy.

With all of this interest in the election, you would think that young people would be running to the polls, but data shows that this is not true. In 2012, with an incumbent who was widely considered to have huge youth popularity, only 38% of Americans aged 18-24 voted. That number is small, but nothing compared to the 2014 election, a year without a presidential election. In 2014, only 15.9% of people under 24 voted.

I could pontificate about how young people need to vote if we want to have any stake in the future of the country. I can complain about how I talk to people who are very involved with politics but don’t actually take the time to order an absentee ballot, but similar thoughts have been written over and over.

My concern isn’t with the two-thirds of young people who don’t vote for the President, but with the majority of presidential voters who don’t consider other elections valuable. Despite its legal supremacy, the federal government has shockingly little impact on most people’s day-to-day lives. Education is managed on a state and local level. So are police, firefighters and infrastructure like roads, electricity and water. Most of the legal system’s activities are conducted at a state level. There are roughly 10 people held in state prisons or local jails for every one federal inmate.

Even on the national level, the President is only a small part of the show. Senators are elected on a different cycle than the President. Representatives are elected every two years. If you care about politics, you can’t just vote every four years and think that’s sufficient to have a voice.

One of the main reasons I think people don’t vote is the feeling of insignificance. With 130 million voters and an electoral college that heavily favors some states over others, it’s easy to give up, never mind that in one city in my home state of Massachusetts, Bernie beat Hillary by a single vote.

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The advantage of off-year or local elections is that one vote counts for a lot more. In a smaller, local election, a single vote can make the crucial difference. Go and learn about your local mayoral election, the town committee or however your local government is organized. That’s where the real possibility for change lies.

Yes, young people need to go out in November and vote, but they also need to vote even when their favorite presidential candidate isn’t running. It’s not about the big, headline-grabbing elections, but the smaller ones that actually impact day-to-day life.

It can seem almost impossible to try to change something in a country so large and so resistant to change as the United States, but trying to change the country isn’t always the answer. Change your city, and maybe that will change your county. Change your county, and maybe that will change your state. Change your state, and maybe the country will follow.

Beni Snow is a freshman from Newton, Mass. He can be reached at bsnow@princeton.edu.

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