About the Contributor
Ashlynn McKinney, Photo Editor
Hello, this is Ashlynn! She is a senior and this is her third and final year in Eagle Eye. She is very involved in her school community; she is an officer...
Voter turnout and the youth vote
January 20, 2021
“I voted” stickers in English and Spanish, Virginia, USA, November 2014. (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) photo.)
One slight difference between the actual election and the student vote is that voter turnout among the students was much lower than the county as a whole.
Voter turnout among all registered voters in the county was very high this year. Nearly 78% of all registered voters cast ballots in this election, based on unofficial totals posted by the county on Friday.
Turnout in Blair County this election year was almost 6% higher than turnout for the 2016 presidential election.
In 2016, Trump received 31,135 votes in Blair County (70.72%), Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton received 13,958 votes (25.22%) of the vote, with three third-party candidates sharing a combined 3.3% of the vote.
TAHS students “turned out” in much lower numbers than the county as a whole, at only 45%.
However, their rate of turnout was not far off the percentage of young voters nationally.
According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), a non-partisan research center on young people’s civic engagement, 50%-52% of young people ages 18-29 voted in the 2020 presidential election, an increase of more than 10% from 2016.
The slightly lower voter turnout among students at Tyrone can at least in part be attributed to the fact that the student vote was not official. Moreover, many students have been absent or are doing online instruction due to COVID and therefore may not have been aware of the mock election.