Before I started making my zine, I did a poll on Instagram, to gain a better understanding of who is interested in politics in Northern Ireland/the youth (my target audience.) With an election coming up, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to see if the younger generation will step up.
I asked only those from Northern Ireland and under 25 to vote. The questions I asked were:
- Do you plan to vote? (Yes or no)
- Have you always voted/did you vote when you were younger? (Always voted or no not always)
- If no, was it A. because you didn’t know enough or B. because you just weren’t interested, or C. something else (what?)
My results for question one were pretty encouraging with 82% saying they are planning on voting! However, the second question revealed only 56% of people voted from the legal voting age onwards, which shows just how much we need to target the younger generation, as they could be key to swinging the vote. The third question revealed why this may be, with the vast majority (72%) saying it was because they didn’t know enough about it all, the rest saying they just weren’t interested. Both are worrying answers. To resolve this we must bring more awareness of the power of voting/a motivation to fight for change to the younger generation, and make an effort to produce easy to understand information. Interesting, in the option where you may add another reason as to why they didn’t vote, a couple mentioned they didn’t feel like it would do any good (a common misconception as if 50 others thought the same thing it would make a massive difference, and of course 1 vote could win an election) or they didn’t feel any party represented them enough to vote. Those who mentioned this feeling of their vote meaning nothing seemed almost defeatist about it, so it’s definitely something we all need to continue to push. This is perhaps more of an issue for the younger end of this group, as another person said, as they got older they realised the value in having your say.
time to change 