Program Targets 18-Year-Old Non-Voters : Politics: Numbers of young people at polls have dwindled to all-time low. Expert hopes pocketbooks will be motivating issue.

It’s been 20 years since 18-year-olds got the right to vote, but their numbers at the polls have dwindled to an all-time low.

The Vietnam War helped draw slightly more than 50% of young voters to the polls in 1972, the year after the nation ratified a constitutional amendment giving 18-year-olds the vote.

“There was a real issue for the voting then--the Vietnam War,” said Rod Risley, executive director of Phi Theta Kappa, the international honor society for two-year colleges. “Now there doesn’t seem to be an issue motivating the students to vote.”

Phi Theta, based in Jackson, has 28 chapters throughout the state, serving over 60,000 students. Some of them will set up voter-registration stations at community colleges in Mississippi as part of a pilot program aimed at reversing the lackluster trend.

Flyers will help explain absentee balloting, help will be available in filling out ballots and Phi Theta chapters will find notary publics to notarize ballots. If the program works at the 15 community colleges in Mississippi, it will be expanded nationwide.

Young people are the nation’s most mobile group, which is one reason for their low voter turnout, said Marlene Cohn, director of election policy for the League of Women Voters Education Fund in Washington, D.C.

To increase their numbers, the league is advocating a “motor voter” program to register young people to vote when they get a driver’s license.

A bill to implement it is expected to be introduced in the U.S. Senate soon.

With no unifying issue like Vietnam, Risley is banking on the pocketbooks of young people to draw them out.

“We’re hoping the lack of funding for two-year colleges will get (Mississippi students) motivated,” Risley said.

Statistics for presidential elections from 1972 to 1988 document the decline in young voter turnout.

According to the League of Women Voters Education Fund, 49.6% turned out among 18- to 24-year-old voters nationwide in 1972. In 1976, it was 42.2%; in 1980, 39.9%; in 1984, 40.8%; and in 1988, only 36.2%.

“In general, 1988 results across the board were bad, the worst in 24 years,” Cohn said.

Young people who don’t vote “don’t feel (the process) is relevant to them,” said Rick Powell, director of programs for Vote America Foundation.

When young people do vote, Powell said, “typically there is a teacher or parents who encouraged their children to keep up with current events and register to vote when they turn 18, or they’re people who’ve become involved with an issue.”

Powell said the importance of voting and civic responsibility should be taught in school from an early age.

Phi Theta was chosen for the pilot program by the Vote America Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Last year, Vote America targeted senior colleges nationwide.

One of the best successes was at the University of Texas in Austin, said Powell, with students getting other students to vote with flyers, posters and political forums.

At two precincts in Austin, made up entirely of students, turnouts of 55% and 49.6% were recorded for the 1990 gubernatorial election there, compared with 19% and 25% in 1986, Powell said.

The focus this year is on the 10 million students in the nation’s 1,200 junior colleges.

“Mississippi serves as a great testing ground because we get students who are bright and committed to working on the project,” Powell said. “It’s a chance to see innovative programs as a precursor to what can happen nationwide in 1992.”