Today’s college students are facing a major hurdle, and it has nothing to do with physics or calculus. America's future leaders aren’t turning in their absentee ballots because they don’t know where to buy stamps. Yes, really.
Campuses today are filled with students who grew up with the internet, smartphones, and Instagram – not stamps or snail mail. But their closeness with technology is influencing local and national elections, according to the findings of a focus group which took place in Virginia over the summer. The group included college-age interns working for the government of Fairfax County, a suburb of Washington DC.
“One thing that came up, which I had heard from my own kids but I thought they were just nerdy, was that the students will go through the process of applying for a mail-in absentee ballot, they will fill out the ballot, and then, they don’t know where to get stamps,” Lisa Connors with the Fairfax County Office of Public Affairs said, according to Washington’s Top News (WTOP).
“That seems to be like a hump that they can’t get across.”
She went on to explain that all of the interns agreed that they knew “lots of people” who did not send in their ballots because it was “too much of a hassle” or they “didn't know where to get a stamp.”
The county is now working on a way for college students to be able to vote where they’re registered, most likely their parents’ address, and to vote absentee “because it’s very confusing and it has a lot of pieces that can sort of go wrong in the middle of it,” said FairFax County Electoral Board Secretary Kate Hanley.
For any college student who is reading this and still stumped on where to buy a stamp, the answer lies in three simple words which generations before you would never have found surprising: the post office.
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