Last month 20/20 reporter John Stossel argued that uninformed voters should stay home on Nov. 4 rather than cast a ballot.

“Voting is serious business,” he said. “Democracy works best when people educate themselves. So maybe instead of telling people things like ‘Rock the Vote,’ these groups should say ‘Rock or Vote.’”

But casting a ballot and performing music aren’t all that different. Both are platforms from which to voice your opinion.

A Place Called Home, a non-profit youth center in South Los Angeles that offers free tutoring and other activities to local residents up to the age of 20, is a living embodiment of this idea. There future voters (aged 12 to 15) can record a piece like “If I Was President,” allowing them to sound off on current events, including gang violence, the price of gas, the global food shortage, and the war in Iraq.

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APCH boasts a two-year-old, $62,000 mini-recording studio and recently released its first album of student-produced and performed music. Not all APCH students participate in the music program—the center offers myriad other activities, including sports and dance—but all of these young people share one thing in common: they reside in some of the most gang-infested neighborhoods in the country, and many look to APCH as a way to escape that world.

When I arrived at the turquoise building on South Central Avenue, Scott Culbertson, the career and activities director for teens, led me past parents and kids eating a hot meal from the kitchen, past students belting out tunes in the music classroom, and to a quiet office where there was a couch, some chairs, and a coffee table where we could relax and sink into conversation. I was introduced to five students and volunteers, all between the ages of 18 and 20, all African-American or Latino, and most voting for the first time on Nov. 4.

The first to join me was Julius Patterson, a tattooed young man who attends Los Angeles Trade-Technical College and who at 20 has returned to APCH as a volunteer. Next to arrive was his younger brother, Justin, who was also a Trade-Tech student and who is currently studying welding and French (welding because it pays, and French because he wants to learn a second language). The two had been coming to APCH for about 10 years.

Soon we were joined by Bianca Alvarez, a young intern who joined APCH about six months prior after seeing her sister benefit from the program, and who said she is split between her interests in music and in fashion design; Paris Montgomery, a young vocalist who recently got word he had been accepted to Berklee College of Music; and Dennis Aguila, another intern who said he would like to design new cell phones, maybe even start his own company. Dennis was the only one in the group still undecided about the presidential election Tuesday. Everyone else was planning to vote for Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

Much attention has been paid to the economy by the presidential candidates as the nation slides into what many politicians are finally calling a recession. But for these young voters, the economic downturn isn’t just a talking point; it’s a hard reality.

“You need to struggle out here to try to find ways to make money every month just to pay rent, and I really don’t have nothing to spend on myself. It’s hard, man. Nobody wants to hire, especially with the stuff that’s going on right now,” Julius said, adding that he has applied to mall shops and major grocery stores, but has never made it past the first interview. “It’s like they never give anybody a chance.”

Others nodded their agreement. Paris said he hadn’t been able to find a job either and added that even though his father once earned a decent salary, it just wasn’t enough anymore. Dennis, 18, who gets around by wheelchair, said he was also looking for a job and still deciding on where to apply for college.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone seemed to agree that the economy is the major—if not the deciding—issue in this election.

Paris said the war had been the top issue for him until the financial crisis changed his mind.

“Everyone I know who used to do O.K. is struggling now,” he said. “That’s probably the most important issue now is I need somebody who’s going to take care of the so-called little people. I feel like McCain wouldn’t do that for America. McCain is, ‘My money’s going into the big corporations, and everybody that’s poor is going to stay poor.’ Yeah, it’s not for me.”

Julius’s brother, Justin, who also attends Trade-Tech, said he got to meet Obama and shake his hand.

“When he came up to my school, he said he would make things better for the homeless people, put them up in shelters and stuff,” Justin said. “We shouldn’t have people sleeping on hard ground. They should be fed.”

If you ask them, these young voters will insist the Obama campaign is not about race or identity. Obama has represented himself first as an American and has never used race to his advantage, Paris said, adding that he feels if anything it’s the other side that has played the race card.

The others seemed to agree. “I think they’ll do whatever they can to bring Obama down. They call him a Marxist, a Communist, even a Muslim” even though he’s not, said Bianca.

So what about those people who will vote on the basis of race to elect Obama?

“I don’t think it’s O.K., but I’m not mad about it, because whatever it takes to get him in, I want Obama in,” said Paris, chuckling. “You know, if that’s what it takes is people voting for him just because he’s black, hey, thank you.”

When I asked whether it was a good idea to vote for Sarah Palin simply because she’s a woman, Bianca spoke up. “She’s not a good representative! But Hillary (Clinton) is actually smart and she actually knows what she’s doing.”

Paris piped in again: “Sarah Palin was McCain’s way of saying, ‘Hey, Obama, you didn’t pick a woman as your vice president. Well, I’m going to steal all the women by picking a woman as my vice president.’ It was what he thought would be a smart move, and it backfired, I believe. I don’t think he knew she would be as ignorant as she is.”

Paris turned out to be the most talkative of the group, and he had a lot to be confident about—his current dilemma is whether to attend Berklee as planned or to pursue a career as a professional recording artist. He said he has already met with recording executives to discuss his future in the industry.

But though the group didn’t exactly wear their excitement on their sleeves, they all said they looked forward to casting their ballots on Tuesday. In fact, they said, this sort of discussion is fairly common around APCH. The staff encourages political engagement. Bianca said she watched at least one of the debates on the televisions at APCH, and even the little kids get civic experience by casting ballots during the youth leadership elections, complete with private voting booths and an official election day.

The album APCH produced is part of the Social Awareness Project. Paris said he was currently helping to produce a second album for the APCH Music Department, and he referred to the two albums as Social Awareness One and Two. The first album is titled Get Involved and sat un-pressed for about a year until the alternative rock band Maroon 5 got involved by paying the production costs. It was so popular among APCH members they decided to do another one. The second one, Paris said, will basically be the “first one on steroids.”

“It’s just a really political album,” he said. “We bring in artists (students) to talk about things we think the community should be aware of, whether it’s worldly issues or stuff that’s happening in our community in the inner city. We talk about safe sex, gang violence, the wars that are going on, the presidential election, broken homes. We just try and touch on everything that needs to be talked about because you don’t hear about it on the radio”—referring most likely to mainstream hip hop, not news radio.

As music supervisor and instructor William Glenn points out to his students, early hip-hop had a political voice. Likewise, the music at APCH serves as a constructive outlet. According to Glenn and Chris Warrior, another APCH instructor and the studio’s sound engineer, one student who got involved in the music program gradually stopped singing about gang-banging (which was what he knew) and embarked on a personal mission to educate people, including his peers, through hip hop.

The music-voting connection didn’t really dawn on me until after I had left and had time to reflect on my conversation with Paris and his peers, but it unfolded something like this:

In his 20/20 report, Stossel made the argument that only informed people should vote. While an educated choice is better than an ignorant one, there’s a reason social activists worked so hard and long to abolish any prerequisites to voting (other than age). We elect representatives precisely because we don’t have expert knowledge regarding the affairs of state. And voting is a means of ensuring that our own views and experiences are represented. It is self-expression, for which young people will seize any outlet, constructive or not.

As Glenn and Warrior pointed out, each of their students possess unique, intrinsic talents. If you don’t give a young person the right tools, you will never hear that singing voice. Deny someone the ballot, and you get a similar result.

Tags: 20/20, a place called home, Barack Obama, election, john stossell, rock or vote, rock the vote