Growing up in Southern California as the son of immigrants, my parents stressed the importance of seizing opportunities, including the right to vote. Their lessons shaped me into a self-taught learner who takes civic duty seriously. Approaching my 18th birthday before the 2022 Presidential election was monumental. However, my excitement turned to disappointment when, upon reaching the voting center at my college, I was informed that I couldn’t vote because I wasn’t registered.
Despite California being a state with so-called “automatic registration,” I was crestfallen to learn that registration required an extra step on my part. My understanding of “automatic” was that there wasn’t an extra step. I was wrong, as a newly eligible voter, I still needed to register online on the Secretary of State website weeks before the election. Unfortunately, this unspoken barrier to participating on Election Day forced me to sit out of my civic duty for a whole other year.
My interest in building a strong sense of community on campus, and running for student government, continued into my studies at Cypress College. Today, I serve as the president of our student body while working toward my degree in Political Science, and will soon be continuing my education at Stanford University. Ultimately, my goal is to run for public office and advocate for social change in Orange Country and throughout the state. Leading up to the 2024 election and recalling my own experience at the ballot box, my co-government leaders and I have been holding registration events on campus for the past year.
I am dismayed and concerned about how common my experience is in people my age – my peers do not know that they can’t simply show up on Election Day without the extra step of registration. On campus, we run voter registration drives to help young voters avoid being turned away like I was. We organize pizza parties and Italian ice-cream socials to help students register. While our efforts have yielded strong results (we’ve registered 600 students on campus, 400 in this year alone), I’m concerned about how much work it would take to produce the same results in campuses across the state.
And this issue affects more than just young voters and college students. I’ve come to learn that our current voter registration system leaves out 4.7 million eligible, but unregistered voters. Most of these 4.7 million people are working-class and Black, Latinx, and Asian American. As a student of government I know that a healthy democracy relies on strong voter turnout, and excluding this electorate severely threatens California’s future as a fair place to live.
That’s why I’m advocating with the California Grassroots Democracy Coalition for Senate Bill (SB) 299 – which would fix our broken voter registration system by automatically registering every eligible voter, without having to opt-in first. Earlier this year, I even traveled to Sacramento to help our representatives understand how disconnected young voters are from the registration process – through no fault of our own.
In school, I’ve learned about how voter registration was born out of Jim Crow-era literacy tests and other barriers to prevent Black and non-white people from voting. These racist laws were passed to disenfranchise people of color communities in America and render them voiceless. This unnecessary step of voter registration is from a bygone era, and continues to create an unnecessary burden that discourages first-time voters from participating in our democracy and electoral process.
California legislators have a unique opportunity to rectify the racist barriers to the ballot box. By passing SB 299, our state leaders will strengthen our democracy by ensuring that all eligible voters are not turned away from the ballot box on election day.
Arjun Ayyappan (he/him) is a second-year student at Cypress College, transferring to Stanford University in Fall 2024 to study Political Science. He currently serves as the President of the Cypress College Student Government and Founder of the Law & Politics Club. He has worked with the California Community College system and California Grassroots Democracy Coalition as an advocate for closing the voter participation gap in youth and underrepresented populations.
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