Estonian National Youth Council (Eesti Noorteühenduste Liit - ENL) and Tartu Local Youth Council (Tartu Noortevolikogu - TNV) organized as a pilot project shadow elections in Tallinn and Tartu from 5th till 8th of October 2009 in order to raise awareness among young people and motivate them to participate in elections and public issues.
The participation rate in Tartu was 42 per cent from all the young people who had the possibility to participate. In Tartu 1392 young people shadow-voted from the possible 3316. The project was organized in 15 schools - in each school students could vote during one day in the breaks.
Shadow elections in such extent and format were organized for the first time in Estonia. Therefore the result is good and such participation percentage shows that repeating shadow elections could break the myth as if young people do not care what is happening around them.
ENL's opinion is that mostly low youth participation is caused by unattractive ways. It is natural that a 15 year old will not enjoy offer of participation when it's done in bureaucratic way.
If it's easy, clear and interesting, young people will take part of it!
A lot of grownups get confused in the sea of bureaucracy and political games, therefore if to play with the idea, such project could be useful for many grownups as well - makes democracy it understandable finally!
15 participated schools in Tartu had one day of shadow elections in each. If the voting boxes would have stayed more days in every schools (let's say two or three) then the voting participation could have been even higher.
Even though the project by participation number failed in the capital (Tallinn) due misunderstandings with the City Government, it also made clear that participation for young people can be successfully organized only if it's easily reachable. Therefore organizing such citizen educational projects in school is natural and productive. To attract young people somewhere where they normally do not go is more complicated and expensive (campaigns, motivating, reaching the youth etc). The same truth is in the agenda with the real elections - participation rate goes down with very bad weather, E-voting is getting rapidly more and more popular etc.
Human being is lazy by nature, it is a sad truth, but considering people are never perfect and accepting this, we can be over the lazyness :)
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Text translated from ENL's blog post
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