To accurately assess the
participation of young people in electoral processes, it is essential to have
reliable data on youth registration, voter turnout, youth EMB staff, observers,
candidates, and memberships of political parties. These kinds of data can help
EMBs develop youth strategies and implement targeted interventions to increase
youth participation. In many contexts, such data are mostly missing, and data
collection remains incomplete.
The UNSC Resolution 2250–mandated progress study,
entitled The Missing Peace: Independent
Progress Study on Youth, Peace and Security, (2018) describes the
significant data gap on youth participation: “despite extensive global data on
overall voting behavior and registration, there was nonetheless a severe lack of
disaggregated datasets for youth within the majority of government electoral
databases, signaling that most governments – including in developed countries –
do not effectively monitor the percentage of youth vote, or make it publicly
available. Out of 202 countries and territories examined in a baseline study,
only seven had available government recorded and publicly shared data on actual
youth voting patterns, 91 had survey-based data available, 10 had incomplete
government data, and 94 had no data available at all on youth voting trends.”[i]
EMBs can address this situation by keeping robust age-segregated data on youth
registration and voter turn-out.
