What If 16-Year-Olds Could Vote?

A growing number of U.S. municipalities are making it possible for minors to vote.

Thousands of high school students in Oakland, California, will be voting for the first time this November after a successful ballot measure gave 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in local school board elections.

Ashley Tchanyoum, a high school junior in Oakland, says she has been encouraging her classmates to register in the lead-up to the election and looks forward to exercising her right to vote for the first time. “It empowers students to have a voice in shaping the policies that affect them every day,” she says.

The Oakland initiative is part of a growing movement in the United States to lower the voting age to enfranchise 16- and 17-year-olds. Proponents of the change argue that young people are already shaping the nation’s politics through influential organizing movements, including March for Our Lives and Sunrise Movement. Those student-led organizations respond to issues that disproportionately affect young people, including gun violence and climate change. With so much on the line, lowering the voting age would give young people a more direct means of intervening in the political process to shape policy on issues that affect them and their futures.

A dozen municipalities have already enfranchised 16- and 17-year-olds in either school board elections, such as in Oakland, or all municipal elections, meaning young people can also vote on local ballot measures and for municipal representatives. The majority of these municipalities are in Maryland. There are also ongoing campaigns to lower the voting age in Washington, D.C., and municipalities in New Jersey. This November, voters in Albany, California, will decide on a similar measure. Meanwhile, statewide campaigns to lower voting age in Missouri, Rhode Island, and Oregon are growing and have garnered support from both Republicans and Democrats.

At the national level, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Representative Grace Meng of New York have introduced legislation to lower the voting age in federal, state, and local elections. When Pressley proposed it as an amendment to the House Democrats’ voting rights bill in 2019, 126 representatives voted in favor—a significant number, even though the amendment failed. More recently, Meng reintroduced an amendment to the Constitution that would lower the national voting age to 16 years old.

“Over the past few years, we have seen the influence [that] young people in our nation have on trends, political movements, and elections,” said Meng in a press release announcing the legislation. “It is time to give them a voice in our democracy.” She first introduced similar legislation in 2018 and then reintroduced it in 2019, 2021, and 2023. Each time, it has failed to move out of committee.

While a federal move to lower the voting age might sound far fetched, Lukas Brekke-Miesner, executive director of Oakland Kids First (OKF), likes to remind naysayers that it has happened before. Less than six decades ago, in 1971, the 26th Amendment to the Constitution lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. “[The Oakland campaign] felt like a bit of an uphill battle,” admits Brekke-Miesner. “But understanding that there is a legacy and precedent of this having happened was a point of hope.”

Today, the push to lower the voting age enjoys less popular support than half a century ago. Back then, both liberal and conservative politicians backed it, arguing that if young people could be conscripted and go to war at 18 years old, they ought to be able to vote then, too. Gallup polls from the era show that most Americans supported the change as early as the 1950s, following a change in eligibility for the military draft, which allowed Americans as young as 18 to be conscripted into World War II.

Today, those poll numbers are much different. One 2019 poll from The Hill/HarrisX found that 75% of registered voters opposed letting 17-year-olds vote, and 84% opposed voting rights for 16-year-olds. Opponents express doubts about whether people in these age groups are mature enough to vote and question whether their votes would differ from those of their parents. Some Republicans, who tend to oppose lowering the voting age in greater numbers than Democrats do, argue that campaigns to lower the voting age are just ploys to get more votes for their rivals.

Studies on adolescent brain development suggest that fears of 16-year-olds not having the decision-making power to cast a vote are unfounded. Instead, research shows that what psychologists call “cold cognition”—meaning a person’s judgment in situations that allow for unhurried decision-making and consultation with others—is likely to be just as developed in 16-year-olds as in adults. While a person’s “hot cognition,” meaning their judgment in high-pressure or emotional situations, tends not to mature until later, the skills needed to make informed decisions at the ballot box are already developed at age 16.

“This idea that young people don’t have the maturity, don’t have the smarts, don’t have the intellect to vote, I think is not only problematic, but it does a disservice to young people,” says LaJuan Allen, director of Vote16USA, a national organization that supports youth-led campaigns to extend voting rights to 16 and 17 year olds at the state and local levels.

Research also suggests that if 16- and 17-year-olds were enfranchised, they would not necessarily vote the same way that their parents do. While there is little data on this phenomenon in the U.S., a study of Scottish voters conducted before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum showed that more than 40% of 16- and 17-year-olds planned to vote differently than their parents. According to Jan Eichhorn, the researcher who led that study, when young people did intend to vote the same way as their parents, they nonetheless came to that conclusion on their own. “They really make up their mind in quite a complex way themselves, and that is really encouraging to see,” Eichhorn told BBC.

In Oakland, the campaign to lower the voting age was a student-led one. Students were driven to organize around lowering the voting age because of issues they experienced and that adults seemed to overlook. First, in 2019, the Oakland School Board cut vital support programs for its students. Student organizers spoke out against the cuts, but the board pursued them anyway. “We could definitely see a disconnect between what students think is important and what school board members do,” shares Tchanyoum. More recently, Tchanyoum says students at her high school have been concerned about the lack of accessible bathrooms on campus and disparities in the amenities and extracurricular programs offered on different campuses in the district. Students would also like to implement programs to improve student–staff relationships and are concerned that their rights to speak about Palestine-related issues are being restricted.

To help get youth voting rights on the ballot in Oakland, Tchanyoum joined the movement as an organizer with Oakland Unified School District’s All City Council Student Union and the Oakland Youth Commission, both of which are part of the Oakland Youth Vote Coalition. That coalition was formed in 2019 with the goal of lobbying the Oakland City Council for a ballot measure to lower the voting age in school board elections. They succeeded, and in November 2020, voters were asked to decide on Measure QQ.

Leading up to the vote, student organizers mobilized voters through phone banking, media interviews, social media, and other advertising. Measure QQ passed, with 67% of Oakland voters voting in its favor. The new rule is being rolled out for the first time this year after organizers worked with election officials, school board officials, and consultants to ensure its smooth implementation. Sixteen and 17-year-olds in neighboring Berkeley will also be voting in school board elections for the first time, following a ballot measure that passed there in 2016 but was slow to be implemented.

For those who argue that enfranchising more young people would be a power grab for Democrats, Allen of Vote16USA says that’s simply not the point: “Lowering the voting age is about enfranchising young people, prioritizing youth voting rights, and strengthening our democracy.”

Plus, some research suggests that voters between the ages of 18 and 24 lean more conservative than voters between the ages of 25 and 29. When girls between the ages of 7 and 12 were surveyed about the 2024 election, the proportion who said they did not identify with either the Republican or Democratic party was larger than those who did identify with one.

While it is unclear how future 16- and 17-year-olds would vote if enfranchised, evidence suggests that either way, enfranchising this group would have benefits for the nation’s democracy, including boosting low voter turnout. Data from Takoma Park and Hyattsville, Maryland, a pair of towns that allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote on all municipal matters, show that enfranchised teens tend to turn out at higher rates than the general population.

Plus, engaging young people in the voting process earlier could encourage long-term civic engagement. Reaching young, would-be voters for the first time when they turn 18 can be challenging because they tend to be going through significant life transitions, like moving from high school to college. However, according to Ava Mateao, president of the voter turnout organization 18by Vote, “If you reach a young person and engage them in the voting process [in] whatever capacity you can when they’re 16 or 17, they’re more likely to be a lifelong voter.” The group also supports lowering the voting age to 16 to boost turnout.

Brekke-Miesner says these big-picture benefits are the ultimate goal: “Our young folks didn’t enter the chat to say, ‘Hey, voting is the end-all, be-all,’ but really because they wanted to have power within their communities,” he says. “That’s the ultimate drive—to get folks re-engaged, organizing in their communities, and engaging in local governance.”