In N.J., teens win right to vote in school board races
Residents as young as 16 have been granted the right to vote in school board elections in Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, beginning in April, after the City Council unanimously approved an ordinance Wednesday lowering the voting age.
If implemented, the measure would make Newark the largest community in the United States to expand voting rights to younger residents since 1971, when the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 nationwide.
“This would far and away be the most consequential effort to lower the voting age to 16 in the country,” said Andrew Wilkes, chief policy officer at Generation Citizen, a national nonprofit group focused on encouraging young people to participate in democracy.
There have been successful efforts to allow younger teenagers to vote in smaller communities in Maryland and Vermont over the past decade.
In 2013, Takoma Park, Md., a 17,000-person suburb of Washington, became the nation’s first city to let 16-year-olds vote in local elections. Last year, Brattleboro, Vt., lowered its voting age to 16. And in California, residents of Berkeley and Oakland approved referendums in 2016 and 2020 giving 16-year-olds the right to cast ballots in school board elections, but the change has never been implemented.
The initiative in Newark, a city 10 miles west of Manhattan where nearly 90% of residents are Black or Latino, is considered a major leap in a nationwide campaign to reinvigorate civics education, encourage greater participation in the democratic process and boost lagging voter turnout.
Last year, only 3.1% of Newark’s 195,000 registered voters cast ballots for the nonpartisan election for the city’s nine-member school board. Each of the three winners won with fewer than 3,500 votes.
Roughly 7,000 16- and 17-year-olds in Newark are likely to be newly eligible to vote in April’s school board race, according to census data, representing a voting bloc large enough to easily sway elections.
“They will actually have to listen to us,” said Nathaniel Esubonteng, a 16-year-old junior at Science Park High School in Newark and a member of the Gem Project, a group that promotes on-time graduation.
The City Council approved the resolution after more than two hours of testimony for and against lowering the voting age. Most of the people opposed to the new age requirement said students were underprepared to make such crucial decisions, and they urged the city to also bolster its civics curriculum.
Newark’s mayor, Ras J. Baraka, a former high school principal, called it a “direct learning experience.”
“It’s a training ground and opportunity to prepare young folks to actually engage in larger elections,” Baraka said in an interview.
Ryan Haygood, a civil rights lawyer who lives in Newark and runs the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, characterized the effort to give younger teens the right to vote as a racial justice effort.
“We’re not waiting for democracy to trickle down from Washington, D.C.,” Haygood said.
His organization, one of the main groups that have pushed for lowering Newark’s voting age, has gotten requests from other large New Jersey cities, including Atlantic City, Camden, Jersey City and Trenton, for guidance on how to win support for a 16-year-old vote, he said. And on Tuesday, Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, also offered key backing in his State of the State address for a proposal to not only permit — but require — the state’s more than 500 communities to allow 16-year-olds to vote in school board races.
If adopted, it would be the first statewide initiative of its kind.
State Republican leaders panned the effort as nothing more than a cynical attempt to pad the Democratic advantage in New Jersey.
“Give me a break,” said Sen. Declan O’Scanlon, a Republican who represents Jersey Shore communities. “They’re not ready to make these decisions,” he said of most 16- and 17-year-olds. “They’re not taxpayers.”