Nana Agyemang will probably do what millennials do and snap a “democraselfie” when she votes in June, continuing the Twitter trend from 2015 — when the election day selfie, and the youth vote, went viral.It shows for the first time she is actually excited to cast a ballot.“Before I never cared for it,” Agyemang said. Like many millennials, the 24-year-old Humber College student seems to have preferred expressing her political voice in forms of engagement other than voting. Agyemang volunteers with a citizen empowerment project that ran a get-out-the-vote drive in 2015 in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood where she grew up, which had a lower turnout than other spots in the GTA. “If you want your voice to be heard and you feel like (it’s possible) to do something positive in your community, it is right for you to vote,” she said.Her experience isn’t unique among millennials. A 2015 report from democracy advocacy group Samara Canada suggests people under 30 participate in non-voting civic and political activities just as much or more than their parents or grandparents do by marching in the streets, volunteering, joining parties, attending speeches, signing petitions, boycotting and talking politics online.So it’s a mistake when older generations shake their fists at kids these days and dismiss them as lazy or ignorant or apathetic about politics, civic engagement advocates say. But that engagement hasn’t carried over to the ballot box — the youngest generations are the least likely to cast ballots. Turnout has dropped over generations. In federal elections in the 1960s, about two-thirds of the youngest electors were showing up on polling day; by the mid-1980s that dwindled to just over half of first-time voters. By 2004, slightly more than a third of youth were voting, said André Blais, political science professor at the University of Montreal and a Canada Research Chair in Electoral Studie ...
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