JBissett@DominionPost.com
Colson Jenkins grinned as he handed over his voter registration form Thursday morning at University High School.
“I’m going straight to the source,” the senior said.
Said source, in this case, being West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner.
“You good, young man?” the state’s top elections official asked as he took the form in the auditorium. “Everything filled out?”
“Yes, sir,” came the student’s reply. “Thank you.”
The school on Baker’s Ridge was one more stop for the secretary, on a tour that started in September for National Voter Registration Month.
High-schoolers readying to turn 18 are always a focus of registration movements, Warner said.
The goal of Thursday’s UHS visit was to get seniors registered – or to at least start them thinking about getting registered.
Over the past eight years in the Mountain State, the secretary added, some 136,000 high school students have registered in time to cast their ballots in local, state and national contests.
West Virginia, in fact, was a leader in that youthful movement going back to World War II,
the secretary told the seniors assembled for the morning.
Citizens then had to be 21 to be eligible to vote.
In 1942, at the height of the fighting in Europe and Japan, President Franklin Roosevelt lowered the draft age from 21 to 18, to bolster the troop rolls shipping out to both theaters of war.
However, the age of 21 for voting in elections stayed on the books.
West Virginia Sen. Jennings Randolph, though, tried to do something about that.
“If they’re old enough for bullets then they’re old enough for ballots,” he famously told FDR. “If they’re old enough to fight and die for their country, then they’re old enough to vote.”
Congressman Harley Staggers Sr., another lawmaker representing the Mountain State on Capitol Hill, said pretty much the same thing to President Richard Nixon some three decades later – when the country was mired in another war, Vietnam, and the draft was still on.
The end result this time was the enacting of the 26th Amendment in 1971, which granted voting rights to 18-year-olds once and for all.
In today’s divisive political climate, Warner said he appreciates even more that power to practice democracy in the voting booth – “It could be Donald Trump or Taylor Swift or anyone in this auditorium,” he said. “We’re all equal.”
Jenkins, meanwhile, said he’s becoming more politically aware these days – especially with mid-term elections coming up next year.
“I didn’t pay much attention before, but I’m starting to now,” said the senior, who was among the 25 who registered on the spot that morning. “This stuff affects everyone.”
