Youth Activist Rallies Popeyes Customers to Get Out and Vote

Big, out-the-door line? Bigger voter-engagement opportunity! 

Earlier this week, David Ledbetter, a highschooler in Charlotte, North Carolina, took advantage of the recent Popeyes chicken-sandwich craze (which residents of Mesa County may or may not be aware of) to remind people to vote. Handing out sample ballots and voter registration forms, Ledbetter truly found a way to use the war over the best chicken sandwich for good. 

Ledbetter is 17 years old and a youth activist in his community. He has co-founded an organization called Imagine This, which helps Charlotte students make it to college. 

For this most recent initiative, he teamed up with Stephanie Sneed, a candidate for Charlotte’s school board, for the project of promoting voter engagement with the hungry customers of Popeyes. “We had been talking about the great chicken sandwich debate,” Sneed told CNN . We came up with the idea to go to Popeyes because of the large number of people waiting in lines.” 

And this idea was most certainly successful. Ledbetter, Sneed, and other volunteers were running out of forms, finding people eager to learn about upcoming elections and the voting process as they waited for their “fast”-food.

Ledbetter told CNN, “I like engaging with the community and I have aspirations with helping people and making society better as a whole.”

The way youth activists in Charlotte took full advantage of this opportunity to reach out to the people in their city marks a trend of modern youth engagement in issues that are important to them. We’ll just have to wait and see what other ideas they’ll come up as the next election year approaches! A large-scale, September 20th voter-registration project at Area 51, perhaps?