‘We try to involve young voters to be more active and be involved in politics, but politics also must be going towards the young people’ – Claudia Luciani stressed on during online talk “Young Voters: Democracy Rebooted”

On 28 September 2020, the online public talk “Young Voters: Democracy Rebooted” was organised by the Council of Europe Division of Elections and Civil Society in order to discuss current challenges and possible strategic solutions to engaging young people into electoral processes. The event was live streamed on Facebook and attracted some 5k views and participants.

The reasons for youngsters becoming less interested and active in elections, as well as different approaches which can be used to change this trend, were discussed and elaborated together with:

• Claudia Luciani, Director, Directorate of Human Dignity, Equality and Governance, Directorate General of Democracy, Council of Europe
• Antje Rothemund, Head of Youth Department, Directorate General of Democracy, Council of Europe
• David Clark, Head of Education and Engagement of the House of Commons, UK
• Tamar Zhvania, Chair of the Central Election Commission of Georgia
• Roman Banari, General Secretary of the National Youth Council in Moldova
• Dan Moxon, Council of Europe expert, “People, Dialogue and Change”, coauthor of the Council of Europe Toolkit “Vote Outside the Box”
• Corina Pirvulescu, Council of Europe expert, “People, Dialogue and Change”, coauthor of the Council of Europe Toolkit “Vote Outside the Box”
• Alice Bregholtz, Coordinator of the priority focus group on youth work and youth participation, Advisory Council on Youth (CCJ)

During the opening remarks, Claudia Luciani drew attention of the speakers and participants of the online talk that such discussion is ‘timely, not only because of the lockdown situation, but also because there are forthcoming elections in number of the Council of Europe member States.’

In the course of the discussion, a particular focus was also made on the Council of Europe Youth Sector Strategy 2030, adopted in January this year. In this regard, Antje Rothemund, mentioned that this new Strategy ‘consists of our plans, mission, vision for the ten years to come. One of the four work priorities in that is revitalising pluralist democracy. Participation and education for democracy has always been part of our work. In the Strategy, you would also find what we are doing under this particular heading and all of these elements are of course relevant to young people in voting, like increasing the capacity of young voters and civil society to actually advance this citizenship within their organisations and their environments, and to develop more participative policies and attractive governance processes, which attract also young people.’

In this context, participants of the online public talk were introduced to the new Council of Europe Toolkit “Vote Outside the Box” as one of the possible instruments to be used by electoral management bodies and other public authorities concerned for engaging young people into electoral processes. Gennadiy Kosyak, Deputy Head of the Council of Europe Division of Elections and Civil Society, while moderating the discussion, noticed that ‘we have to use the communication which is the closest to youngsters. [...] We are very happy that, as the Council of Europe, we are trying to innovate. But we innovate together with many other actors in the electoral field. The process of attracting people to vote takes a different angle and is getting more and more social media engaged. For us, as the Council of Europe, it is important to be in the stream today in order to be able to work together with electoral administrations, with our member States, on how to attract voters to vote in meaningful, responsible manner. And that is what this Toolkit is about.’

The Toolkit is currently available in English and Ukrainian.

The live stream record of the online public talk can be found here.