Kids Voting Candidate Guide & Forum

About the Program

Category: Civic Education and Public Information (Best in Category)

Year: 2016

Kids Voting is a program of Durham County Cooperative Extension that seeks to help K-12 youth in our community understand and believe in the power they have as informed citizens and active voters. In addition to providing youth the opportunity to vote on the same candidates and issues as adults, in recent years, Kids Voting has supported young people in creating their own Candidate Guide and Candidate Forum that help not only them, but adults, be educated about the offices and candidates up for election. Each election, Kids Voting brings together middle and high school students to create anon-partisan candidate guide that includes a questionnaire youth create for candidates, information about offices up for elections, and resources to learn more about civic engagement. Students follow this with an innovative student-designed and –led candidate forum in which candidates round-robin between groups of students answering questions about the issues that are most important to them and hearing young people’s input on key local topics. The candidate guide is distributed to all Durham Public Schools, charter, and private schools serving the county’s over 40,000 students, but is also of such high quality that many adults in Durham use it to help inform their vote. The youth candidate forum is regularly attended by all candidates in local races and is often held up by students, media, and candidates as having the most insightful questions and discussions. Student feedback shows that they better understand local government, feel more empowered to voice their opinions and experiences to elected officials, and plan to be active voters and engaged citizens after participating in Kids Voting Durham candidate guides, forums and elections. In 2015, K-12 student participation in Kids Voting Durham City Council elections was nearly three times the adult turnout at the polls, hopefully creating a new generation of more engaged and informed voters in local elections.