This year Manitou Springs High School’s National Honor Society won the Eliza Pickrell Routt Award for the large number of eligible seniors they got registered to vote.
The current Secretary of State, Jenna Griswold, created the award and named it after Routt, the first lady of Colorado in 1876 because she was the first woman to be registered to vote in Colorado after the passage of women’s suffrage in 1893.
“The Secretary of State created the award to be given to high schools that register 85% or more of the senior class to vote,” NHS adviser Amanda Kerrigan said, “but we do encourage juniors to pre-register just to help us for next year.”
Teens can pre-register to vote starting at age 16. Once they turn 18, their registrations automatically turn over to official voter registrations. Anyone can check their registration status at the Colorado voter registration site.
NHS won the award during the 2019-2020 school year and was the first school to win it this school year. “We won it in 2020 and that was the COVID year,” Kerrigan said. “So we started and then we went out of school because of COVID at the end of the year and we pulled it together through email in February.”
NHS member Kate Johnson thinks this award represents that the younger generations want their voices heard in the government. “We are very hopeful to continue winning the award because it shows that our student body wants their voices to be heard within decisions made in our government,” Johnson said. “It’s important to have representation of younger ideas within our government because we see things within our society that people who aren’t in our generation don’t. It’s our future that is at stake, not theirs.”
The club hopes that after students register they will take action and vote in the upcoming elections. “We really hope that once students register to vote, they will actually go vote so it’s not just signing the paper and next year is a presidential election,” Kerrigan said. “It will be the first presidential election that students are eligible to vote in who are 18 by election day, so we hope that they will go and vote and experience that.”
