by Oscar Cain

The League of Young Voters partnered up with the Pittsburgh Community Association, Inc., and a host of volunteers to clean up the Pittsburgh community in downtown Atlanta.  Both organizations are invested in the community and maintaining its beauty. In addition to picking up trash we planted fresh tomatoes and other vegetables in the Welch St. garden to harvest soon.

It was an exciting opportunity to clean up our community and also celebrate Earth Day.  By picking up trash we were able to show Mother Nature that we appreciated Her. It’s important that we keep the environment pollution-free because clean air equals healthier children. #EarthDay2013

This year was a transformative and remarkable year for the League of Young Voters. We ambitiously hit the streets knocking on more than 175,000 doors across the country to show that we were paying attention. We picked up the phone and called more than 23,000 young voters to ignite a conversation. Our youth leaders begin working at the crack of dawn and  continued into the weary hours of the night trying to educate young people about the implications of not voting.

We fought with tenacity and left mainstream media outlets in utter shock as the young voters turned out in record numbers for the 2012 election. We made our voices heard loud and clear.

WE SHOWED THE WORLD WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!

From Texas to Maine, the battles we fought, we won. We left a clear message that equality, respect, and voting rights were not a liberty that we would just hand over politely. There were many things that were accomplished  by our organizer across the country in 2012. We would like to share a glimpse of what it means to do grassroots cultural organizing in low-income communities as a League organizer.

Take a look at our 2012 Spotlight Yearbook.

In 2013, we plan to on criminal justice issues, election modernization, and voter suppression. Support our cause today at YoungVoter.org/Donate

Young voters represented a greater share of the national electorate Tuesday than four years ago, once again voting for President Barack Obama by a huge margin, boosting his reelection.

Voters from ages 18 to 29 represented 19 percent of all those who voted on Tuesday, according to the early National Exit Poll conducted by Edison Research. That’s an increase of one percentage point from 2008. Obama captured 60 percent youth vote, compared with Mitt Romney’s 36 percent.

Headlines suggested a lack of enthusiasm among college students in this election and polling showed fewer were registered or planning to vote.

“The role young people would play during this election has been a major question in American politics for over a year, and it seems the answer is that they have been as big a force at the polls in 2012 as in 2008,” said Peter Levine, director of the youth research organization CIRCLE at Tufts University. “They again supported President Obama, although not as lopsidedly as in 2008. Until tomorrow, it will be unclear whether youth turnout — or the turnout of any group — rose or fell, but young people were proportionately well represented in the 2012 electorate.”

Read the rest at Huffington Post.