CHARLESTON W.Va. — Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day and West Virginia high school students got the chance to register.
West Virginia Secretary of State, Mac Warner, and 2018 Miss Teen International, Georgia Clark, teamed up to deliver the message of registering to vote and letting students register at three West Virginia high schools.
“The students have enjoyed this,” Warner said. “They have seen this individual in Miss Clark who has a lot of poise and a lot of character and her message is so powerful of civic getting engagement and getting involved early. If we can give these students a first positive experience when they go to the polling place, they will stay engaged, pulling them into the community, electing their own leaders and maybe running for office themselves. That’s success in my book.”
Warner and Clark stopped at Cabell Midland High School, Hurricane High School and George Washington High School to communicate the importance of registering with a chance to register after the event.
Clark, 18, is an Alabama native and freshman student at Troy University studying political science with a background in the ROTC. She won the Miss Teen International pageant in Charleston and largely due to her platform in civic engagement of young adults.
“It’s been great,” Clark said. “I feel really good about how this went today. We’ve had kids registering, I feel like we’ve done really good and have resonated with these kids. The response from the students has been exactly what I hoped.”
Just over 24,000 of the 78,000 new voters since Warner took office have been high school students, according to Warner. West Virginia has just over 1.2 million registered voters.
“We need to, as adults, to engage them and pull them into that process because they see the world differently,” Warner said of young adults. “If one person stays home because they haven’t been engaged properly, I think that’s a failure on our part, both teachers, adults, parents and me as an elected official.
“Every vote counts and every vote matters. We need them to tie into what they are learning in the classroom to what’s going on here with a very important Senate race in West Virginia. The balance of power could turn on what happens with this senate race in West Virginia.”
To register to vote online, click here.