Two months of youthful activism in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre was expected to produce a bumper crop of teens registering to vote for the first time.
But in Tallahassee, the epicenter of the Florida protests, all the noise, speeches and carnival-like atmosphere have not produced a number of new young voters. The opposite happened. There now are fewer voters among the 18-25 age group than there were before the shooting.
According to the Leon County Supervisor of Elections office, there has been a drop of 690 registered voters in Leon County since Feb. 14 among the youngest voting-age group.
The number of vanishing youth voters grows larger the longer you look at voter registration rolls. Tallahassee, home to more than 63,000 students of two universities and a college has seen registration among younger voters drop by 4,673 since March 2017.
(Tallahassee Democrat)