Two state bills would allow 17-year-olds to vote

More high school students could be headed to the polls under a pair of bills that would clear the way for California 17-year-olds to vote.

“This is an idea whose time has finally come,” said Assemblyman Kevin Mullin, D-San Mateo, whose ACA4 would allow 17-year-olds to vote in primary elections if they would turn 18 before the November general election. “It’s building on the feeling that we want to engage young people in the voting process.”

Assemblyman Evan Low, D-San Jose, would take the idea a step further. His bill, ACA8, would drop the voting age to 17 for every election, from mosquito abatement district all the way to president.

The younger voting age would not only connect more teenagers to the political process but also give their concerns a better chance to be heard, Low said.

“Lowering the voting age to 17 would allow teens to get a sense of the importance of voting at an earlier age,” he said. “And since young people don’t vote, politicians instead go to every retirement home possible” in search of the support they need.

Twenty-three states plus the District of Columbia allow 17-year-olds to vote in primary elections or caucuses, but Low’s measure would plow new territory. No state, county or city allows people younger than 18, the age set in 1971’s 26th Amendment, to vote in federal general elections.

Low admitted his bill could face constitutional problems. State and local communities,

however, can set voting age rules for their own elections, which includes the primaries in federal contests — although not the general election.

If the Legislature passes the bills, they would have to be signed by the governor before appearing on the March 2020 ballot for approval by California voters.

The issue is personal for both Low and Mullin.

Low, who was 31 when he was first elected to the Assembly in 2014, identifies with young people who are pushing for their place in politics. As a government and political science teacher at De Anza College in Cupertino, Low found that many of his students didn’t have a basic knowledge of how the political system works.

“They may have had a high school civics class, but so much emphasis now is on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), students who can’t vote see no reason to participate,” Low said.

Mullin is following in the footsteps of his father. Former Assemblyman Gene Mullin, who taught government classes for 32 years at South San Francisco High School, introduced an identical bill in 2008 to let 17-year-olds vote in primaries. It never made it through the Legislature.

So far, that’s also been the story for the two assemblymen. A 2017 bill by Low to let 17-year-olds vote in federal elections collected only 46 votes in the 80-member Assembly, well short of the 54 needed to move it to the state Senate. Kevin Mullin introduced teen voting bills in 2013 and 2016, and neither made it out of the Assembly.

“The bills just got hung up in partisan politics,” Mullin said. “The concern from the Republican side is that we’re trying to form more Democrats.”

Although the Democrats say that’s not true, it’s not a misguided fear on the part of Republicans, said Mark Baldassare, a pollster who is president of the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

“Most young voters register as ‘decline to state,’ ” or no political party, as it’s now known, he said. But polling has shown those independent voters “lean to Democrats in elections by about a 2-to-1 margin,” Baldassare said.

But even that partisan lean doesn’t always translate into support for lowering the voting age.

In San Francisco, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 57 percent to 7 percent, voters rejected a measure in 2016 that would have lowered the voting age to 16 in local elections, although not in state and national contests.

In Washington, D.C., one of the nation’s most heavily Democratic areas, the D.C. Council refused in November to even vote on a measure that would have dropped the voting age to 16.

There’s also a trend in California away from conferring the responsibilities of adulthood on teenagers.

California raised the minimum age for buying tobacco from 18 to 21 in 2016, and last year made it illegal for anyone under 21 to buy any sort of gun. When they legalized recreational use of marijuana, state voters set the minimum age for purchasing cannabis at 21.

In 2017, the Legislature passed a bill that would have barred new drivers under 21 from driving between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. for a year after receiving their licenses. Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it, arguing that “adults should not be subject to the same driving restrictions presently applied to minors.”

There’s a huge difference between buying cigarettes and voting, said Kei Kawashima Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

“There’s solid neurological research showing that 21-yearolds are different” from 17year-olds, who are more prone to making impulsive decisions, Kawashima-Ginsberg said. But impulsiveness isn’t what voting is all about, she said.

“There are places where age matters, but voting isn’t one of them,” Kawashima-Ginsberg said.

Mullin voted in the Assembly to raise the ages for tobacco and gun purchases and to restrict licenses for drivers under 21. But he agreed that those have nothing to do with voting.

“Smoking is a habit that we want to discourage from an overall public health standpoint. Gun ownership and driving with an unrestricted driver’s license have been shown to have public safety implications,” he said in a statement. “In the case of voting and civic engagement, this is behavior we want to, or should want to, encourage.”

Both Mullin and Low are confident their bills have the backing they need to get on the March 2020 ballot.

“There’s bipartisan support now,” Low said, along with growing interest from young people eager to make their political voices heard.

Then there’s the boost that comes from a November election that gave Democrats strong two-thirds majorities in both the Assembly and Senate.

“Voting is fundamental to the citizenship feeling,” Low said. Lowering the voting age “ensures that more people will be able to shape not only our present, but our future.”

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth