Well, 2026 started off with a bang for COCO, the Community Outreach Committee. To celebrate LWV’s mission to empower voters, COCO embarked on a journey to preregister future voters in our local high schools for Citizenship Month, which is celebrated in January in Snohomish County. We scheduled tabling events in six high schools: Edmonds Woodway, Lynnwood, Mountlake Terrace, Jackson, Snohomish, and Everett. We used our new Voter Registration Card, designed by LWV member Erin Kester, to register the voters. Some students opted to register right there while we were present at the school. Most opted to take the cards home and register away from the distractions of the lunch rooms where we mounted an LWV table.
At these events our team of volunteers used the LWV spinning wheel, with questions about voting to win a sweet candy treat. It is amazing that these students were drawn in numbers to the wheel to spin and win. This gave us an opportunity to engage with them and explain why LWV was on their campus. The table captain scheduled three additional volunteers at each location. Two volunteers remained at the table and the two remaining volunteers circulated among the lunch tables. They talked with the students about eligibility to register at age 16 and being automatically sent a ballot when they reached the voting age of 18. With this format, LWV was able to talk with easily over 1,100 future voters, and we got requests for 497 QR codes. In addition we checked the status of 33 students who had already registered and did 12 registrations on the day that we were on campus.
Now in case you are wondering how we know this, we used our handy dandy new tally sheet so that we could track the success of our efforts. It was a grand idea because with these numbers we would say that this interaction with 16-18 year-olds was a resounding success.
We found the students to be very responsive to our information. They took pocket Constitutions, Do’s and Don’ts of sharing information, ICE encounter information, and lots of candy and voting stickers! One young man at Everett High School took all the “FUTURE VOTER” stickers from his friends and put them all over his sweater and proclaimed himself “THE Future Voter.” Table captain, Nadine Shanti, told him that she expected him to stand before the students in the remainder of his classes and loudly encourage them to be future voters as well. He promised he would, and that young man had the personality to do it!
Vonita Francisco did a wonderful job of organizing the registration at the schools in the Edmonds School district. Thank you, Vonita. Also Carolyn Miller, Jim Miller, and Brenda Harrison were essential in making sure that we were adequately stocked with the materials we would need to have a successful registration series.
These events could not take place without some extraordinary effort from volunteers. As table captain, Nadine Shanti wants you to know who stepped up as volunteers to make this program work: Vonita Francisco, Michele Meola, Carol McMahon, Deborah Brown, Melissa Wassermann, Pat Cooper, Sue Renhard, Jill Bray, Leslie Roberson, Karen Crowley, Brenda Harrison, Jill Bray, Audrey Gervasi, Laura Hudgins, Carolyn Miller, Jim Miller, Donna Witte, Barbara Ecklund, Bruce Ecklund, and Joan Smith. The LWV of Snohomish County is lucky to have a cadre of committed volunteers who help make these events successful. If I missed anyone, please forgive me. Thank you all and we hope to work together again soon to defend democracy and empower voters.