Meet the people boosting voter participation among young Mainers

Democracy ProjectDuring this election year, the BDN’s politics team is focusing on how political polarization, cynicism and apathy is changing civic life in Maine. Read our full explanation of the series, see all the stories and share ideas by filling out this form.
Maine has routinely led or nearly led the nation in voter turnout in recent elections, but it has work to do when it comes to registering teen voters.
A national group released data in early October showing a little more than 35 percent of 18-year-old Mainers are registered to vote. Participation is lower in rural counties and well below the 83 percent of eligible Maine voters — about 950,000 people — registered ahead of the Nov. 5 election, according to Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ office.
On one hand, the lower registration rates for teens who become eligible to vote at 18 are not totally bleak or unique to Maine. The state was tied for second nationally in having 36 percent of residents younger than 30 vote in the 2022 gubernatorial election.
But the fact that the rest of the population in an aging state votes at higher rates is a sign of missed but available opportunities to better engage younger Mainers, students and officials said in interviews. They live in a state where 78 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2020 election, placing Maine second nationally for turnout behind Minnesota.
“It really can be hard to engage because of the constant negative feedback we receive” in politics, said Anna Siegel, 18, a Yarmouth native and Cornell University freshman.
There is reason to believe the registration rate among 18-year-olds will soon rise in a state with robust early voting and options to register online, automatically when getting a driver’s license or in person the day of an election.
Various groups are also working to boost voting and civic engagement among students. Siegel, who attended Portland’s Waynflete School, pointed to the Maine Youth Political Portal, a website she recently helped launch featuring resources to help young Mainers participate in politics and run for office.
Maine is still behind the curve when considering other states. The Civics Center, a national nonprofit focused on high school student registration, used September data from voter files and the U.S. Census Bureau to find 35.6 percent of 18-year-olds in Maine were registered to vote. While the group has not looked at all 50 states, Maine was below many other states it studied.
Maine is ahead of neighboring New Hampshire, where 21.2 percent of 18-year-olds are registered, according to the Civics Center. The Granite State’s voting policies are more restrictive than Maine’s. A county-by-county look at Maine’s registration rates for 18-year-old voters also revealed geographic divides that often include socioeconomic differences as well.
Hancock (47 percent), Lincoln (44.2 percent) and Cumberland (42.2 percent) counties led the state in 18-year-old registration rates as of September, the Civics Center found, while Aroostook (26.9 percent), Somerset (28.7 percent) and Piscataquis (29 percent) counties were last.
The Civics Center noted Maine’s online registration system only went into effect earlier this year. Bellows, the Democratic secretary of state, echoed that point and said she is encouraged by what she observed on recent visits to high schools and colleges.
While at Yarmouth High School on National Voter Registration Day in September, Bellows noticed students could use QR codes or paper registration cards to sign up to vote.
“And all students were scanning the QR codes,” Bellows said.
That same day, the Colby Votes initiative at Colby College in Waterville registered 100 students to vote either in Maine or by absentee ballot in their home states, according to Elizabeth Jabar, the Lawry Family Dean of Civic Engagement and Partnerships at the private college.
Four Colby Votes fellows — Eli Shear-Baggish, Neomie Noel, Anthony Simescu and Olivia Oeltjen — also set up tables by the Coburn Hall dorm Wednesday afternoon to ask passing peers if they had a plan to vote in the upcoming election. Music played from a speaker while a food truck offering free tacos drew in students who had voted or planned to.
“A lot of times, [students] will say they don’t like either candidate,” said Oeltjen, a sophomore from Moorestown, New Jersey. “So I’ll say, ‘Let’s bring it to the local issues.’”
That focus on city or state-level referendums rather than the presidential race often better motivates their peers, the Colby students said.
Allyson Gardner, the director of Maine Students Vote, a nonpartisan group focused on boosting youth engagement, agreed, saying young Mainers are turned off by the two-party system. The upcoming state flag referendum and issues in their communities matter more, Gardner added.
“For a lot of students, the conflict between these two political parties is all that they’ve known,” Gardner said. “They’re like, ‘I’ve never seen anything change.’”
There’s optimism for the future. Plenty of Maine students who are not yet 18 are talking about issues important to them through the Can We?   Project, which grew out of Waynflete to now include 19 schools with cohorts of freshmen through seniors who use a series of retreats to practice civil dialogue and civic engagement with each other.
John Holdridge, the director of Waynflete’s Third Thought Initiatives for Civic Engagement, led a group of Monmouth Academy students during a Can We? Project retreat held Thursday at Camp Mechuwana in Winthrop. The group started the morning with an exercise in which students used markers to draw pictures of their families or issues important to them.
They took turns of no more than 60 seconds to tell a peer across from them what they drew and why before the partner summarized what they heard, encouraging listening and understanding.
The simple exercise and ensuing group discussions brought up mentions of reproductive rights, guns, climate change and freedom. One of the older students, Devonte Diaz, told a reporter he welcomes rather than worries about sharing differing opinions.
And for the senior planning to vote, his upcoming 18th birthday is on the perfect day: Nov. 5.