Finally!
Some good news in this bleak world!

Does this take into account all the students who didn't bother to change their address on their voter registration when they went to school? I know I didn't change mine from my parent's house, along with all my other mail, when I was at UW. Kind of a pain in the ass when you might end up moving every year, and I know a lot of other people did the same.

@2 for the win.

And honestly, if you're hoping for college age kids to save your ass at the ballot box you need to run better candidates.

@2 @3

The study was of registered voters, and the maps were drawn based on the addresses on the registrations. So anyone registered "back home" would show up in the data for wherever back home is, not in the data for the university neighborhoods.

This is all based on public records: when you register to vote, your registered address is a public record. When you vote, the fact that you voted (or didn't) is also a public record (though who you voted for is not, of course).

Fuck that man, fuck'n two party system it's all fuck'n fixed anyway, 'sides i gotta fuck'n paper to write on fuck'n Sylvia fuck'n Plath for fuck'n tuesday, and fuck! Jessica just totally dissed me on snapchat - fuck

@5

I, too, remember being young.

This isn't a "those darn Millenials" situation-- GenX didn't vote when they were young, the Boomers didn't vote when they were young, not even The Greatest Generation voted when they were young.

Every generation does at least eventually take its turn bitching about how the youngs don't vote, so there's some symmetry in all of this, at least.

@6 - the 'Greatest Generation, and to a lesser extent the 'Baby Boomers,' didn't vote when they were 'young' because the voting age wasn't lowered from 21 to 18 until 1971.

Many of the 'Greatest Generation' were also preoccuppied with fighting WWII during the elections of 1942 and 1944. There weren't many polling places on Guadalcanal.

@7

I feel pretty comfortable comparing the voting rates of adults aged 18-34 with the voting rates of adults aged 21-34.

And a generation lasts more than two years. Voting for soldiers (which has always been and is still via absentee ballot, not polling place) was more difficult in WW2 than it is today, true enough. But the Geezer Generation didn't vote during the non-wartime elections in their youth, either.

Does this take into account people who leave though? If you register on campus and ballots are mailed mid-summer I'd imagine a lot of ballots end up 1) at old addresses, since most students change dorms or 2) lingering in campus mailboxes until September when students come back. Add to that the number of kids who register (often at drives on campus) as freshmen, use their campus address, and either leave or never change it, and you've got a unique neighborhood where the population necessarily turns over annually and physically doesn't live there for a third of the year. Sure, it's on them to update their registration, but I'm not sure this data = "college kids don't vote" all on its own.

Seattle should be glad that a bunch of self-absorbed & uninformed interlopers are not voting in local elections. I never voted in my college town because I had no intention of living there after school and was far more informed about my hometown.

@9

Er, the study does indeed say "college kids don't vote."

You are correct in suggesting that it doesn't say anything about why college students don't vote, but the methodology isn't leaving out any college students who do vote.

Again, the data is all in the public record. This isn't a case where the sampling gets messed up because interviewers are going to the wrong neighborhoods or other common problems in polling or surveys. There's no need to sample for this, there's no need to poll or survey; all of the data for everyone is publicly available, and all of it was used to compute these results.

And these results aren't surprising, at least not to anyone who has been paying attention to voting patterns for a while. College students have never voted in large numbers relative to older demographics.