Young voters and the next election

The first time I voted I was in a church basement in Reynoldsburg with a sticker that said I MADE A DIFFERENCE, which felt like a dare. I was 18 and my dad had driven me because he does not trust me with the Honda on Morse Road at rush hour. He waited in the car like it was a dentist appointment. When I came out he said, "Good. Now don't make me do this every time." He meant: be the kind of person who shows up without a chauffeur.

Midterms are coming and the campus is doing that thing where the same three clubs share a folding table and a bowl of Starbursts that have melted a little. The energy is not 2020. It is not even 2024. It is a shrug with a QR code.

I am supposed to write this like a young Black man who is either a warning or an inspiration. I am a sophomore who changed his major twice and still calls his mother in Accra time on Sundays because she worries I only eat ramen, which is not true, I also eat the chicken from the place on High Street that is trying too hard. I am not a demographic. I am late to lecture.

Turnout talk makes me itchy. Pundits love a chart about "the youth vote" the way my old youth pastor loved a chart about purity. Both charts treat us as a tank of gas. Fill us, win. The truth on this campus is simpler and ruder: a lot of people I know think the election is a group project where someone else will do the slides.

Mail ballots. My roommate from Cleveland Heights swears by them because he interned on a campaign and saw the lines. My other roommate, whose dad listens to a lot of talk radio in a truck, swears mail ballots are how you lose a country in a filing cabinet. They argue over cereal. I have become the person who says, can we look at Ohio's actual process before we do the apocalypse. Nobody wants that person at breakfast.

I will say the conservative worry without the cartoon. If you mail millions of ballots, you create a chain of custody that is longer than a polling place on Tuesday. Longer chains have more rooms for screwups and, yes, for cheating, even if cheating is rarer than the Facebook uncles think. A long chain also lets my aunt who works doubles at the hospital vote without choosing between a shift and a civic sticker. Both of those sentences can be true. I wish campaigns would let them be true instead of picking one to throw at the other's head.

What I don't respect is the laziness on my side of the cafeteria. People who can register a mini-fridge in 20 minutes cannot figure out a ballot. People who know the drop date of a sneaker cannot remember a primary. Then they say "both parties" like it's a personality. Both parties is sometimes fair. It is also a great way to stay in bed.

Ohio is not a meme. It is my tuition and a statehouse that actually does things to campuses, to abortion travel, to union stuff my uncle in Dayton cares about. If you skip the midterm because the presidential was a circus, you are letting the circus set the calendar. The circus would like that.

I canvassed once in 2024 in a precinct that was all porch flags and dogs that hated clipboards. An older white guy told me he didn't trust mail ballots because his neighbor got two. I wrote it down. I didn't argue him into a statistic. When I checked later, Ohio had a process for that, spoiled ballots, the usual unglamorous machinery. The machinery is not a vibe. If we talked about machinery more, we would sound less crazy.

There's a rumor every cycle that somebody is going to "collect" student votes, like we are a crop. Nobody is coming to collect us. The parties will send a text that sounds like it was written by a committee that has never been in a dorm. The rest is on us, which is annoying, because being on us is not as cinematic as being suppressed. I am not saying suppression is fake. I am saying in Franklin County the bigger thief is inertia, and inertia doesn't photograph well.

Last spring I took the #2 bus to early vote at the library on North High because my Tuesday lab ran until 7 and I was not going to do the martyr thing in a rainstorm. The poll worker was a woman in a cardigan who called me "hon" and asked if I wanted IDs in the tray or in my hand, a question that should not be a national emergency. A guy behind me muttered about mail ballots being "the trick." He was holding a mail-ballot envelope. I did not have the energy to diagram it. I wanted him to vote. I wanted him to stop doing theater in a library.

My dad's naturalization ceremony was in a room that smelled like carpet cleaner. He cried in a way he would hate me putting in an essay. He votes like it is rent. I am trying to inherit that without inheriting his lectures about my hair. He still mails a ballot back to a county he doesn't live in anymore, then calls me to confirm I didn't "forget America" because I had a midterm. I did not forget. I am in America. America is a library cardigan and a bus and a form with my address spelled wrong until I fix it.

If the midterm is a snooze, the snooze still writes the rules for the next presidential, for the county board, for whether my friend who is on a visa feels like this place is a rumor or a country. I want the mail ballot to be boring. I want the polling place to be boring. Boring is the point. Excitement is how you get a circus and then a hangover and then a bunch of 19-year-olds who think politics is a concert they can miss.

I am going to vote early, in person, because I like the sticker even though I made fun of it, and because I want my roommate's dad to know that a Nigerian kid in Columbus can stand in a line and not steal a country. That is a petty reason. I have petty reasons. I also have a constitution midterm on Thursday. I will do both. The Constitution one is harder, which feels backwards and is probably the lesson.

Come November I don't need a wave. I need a line that moves, a form that works, and fewer speeches about the future from people who don't check if we got off the bus.