In Newark, 16-year-olds ‘with skin in the game’ will get the vote
The City Council of Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, is expected Wednesday to give residents 16 and older the right to vote in school board elections that begin in April.
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 be by far the most consequential effort to lower the voting age in the country to 16,” said Andrew Wilkes, chief policy officer at Generation Citizen, a national nonprofit focused on encouraging young people to participate to democracy.
There have been some successful efforts over the past decade to get younger teens to vote in smaller communities in Maryland, California and Vermont.
In 2013, Takoma Park, MD., a Washington suburb of 17,000, became the first city in the country to allow 16-year-olds to vote in local elections. Last year, Brattleboro, Vt.lowered the voting age to 16 years. And in California, residents of Berkeley and Oakland passed referendums in 2016 and 2020 that gave 16-year-olds the right to vote for school board, but the change was never implemented.
The initiative in Newark, a city 10 miles west of Manhattan, was close 90 percentThe percentage of residents who are black or Latino is considered a major step in a nationwide campaign to revive civic education, encourage greater participation in the democratic process and boost lagging voter turnout.
Last year alone 3.1 percent of Newark’s 195,000 registered voters cast ballots in the nonpartisan election for the city’s nine-member school board. Each of the three winners won by fewer than 3,500 votes.
According to census data, about 7,000 16- and 17-year-olds in Newark will likely become eligible to vote again in April’s school board race, representing a voting bloc large enough to easily influence elections.
“They’re really going to have to listen to us,” said Nathaniel Esubonteng, a 16-year-old junior at Science Park High School, one of Newark’s top-performing schools.
City council and school board chairmen have approved the lowered voting age, with final approval expected at a city council meeting Wednesday afternoon.
“It’s a training ground and an opportunity to prepare young people to actually participate in larger elections,” said Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, a former high school principal.
Newark occupies a unique place in history. It was decimated in 1967 by racial unrest that left 26 dead, left entire blocks in charred ruins and accelerated a decades-long exodus from the city by white, middle-class residents.
Over the past decade, the city has reduced violent crime and recovered economically as it leveraged its proximity to New York City to lure businesses and affluent residents in search of cheaper rents.
Yet less than 24 percent of the city’s 300,000 residents now own their own home, and one in four residents live in poverty. The city’s public school system was long believed to be failing, resulting in a state takeover that began in 1995 and did not end until 2020.
Ryan Haygood, a civil rights attorney who lives in Newark and directs the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, characterized the effort to give younger teens the right to vote as an effort for racial justice.
“We are not waiting for democracy to trickle down from Washington, DC,” Mr. Haygood said.
His organization, one of the main groups that has pushed to lower the voting age in Newark, has received requests from other major New Jersey cities — including Atlantic City, Camden, Jersey City and Trenton — for advice on how to support win for a 16th anniversary. -old voice, he said. And on Tuesday, Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, in his State of the State address also offered significant support for a proposal to not only allow — but require — the state’s 500-plus communities to adopt 16 allowing year-olds to vote in school board races.
If passed, it would be the first effort of its kind statewide.
Republican state leaders blasted the effort as nothing more than a cynical attempt to widen the Democratic lead in New Jersey. Democrats already outnumber registered Republicans in New Jersey 955,000 voters.
“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 are not taxpayers.”
Rep. Grace Meng, a New York Democrat, did just that legislation introduced in Washington to lower the voting age for all national elections to 16, a proposal that has not yet received widespread public support. a 2019 Poll by Hill-HarrisX found that 75 percent of respondents opposed allowing 17-year-olds to vote; 84 percent were against letting 16-year-olds vote.
Research has shown that the sooner people start voting regularly, the greater the chance that it will become a vote lifelong habit. More than a dozen states, including New Jersey, allow this 17-year-olds are allowed to vote in the primaries if they will be 18 before the general election.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, efforts began to amend the Constitution to lower the voting age to 18 at the state level—with New Jersey leading the way. The movement was fueled by the argument that Americans who were old enough to be drafted and fight in wars should also be allowed to vote.
David DuPell, 76, took a year off from school at Rider University in Lawrence Township, NJ, because he and Stuart Z. Goldstein and another student leader, Ken Norbe, helped run a campaign that resulted in 1969 endorsement by New Jersey’s Republican-led party. Legislature on a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age to 18. However, voters in New Jersey rejected the amendment, and energy shifted to Washington and the fight for the 26th Amendment.
Mr. DuPell, who now lives in California, said he supported efforts to lower the voting age in New Jersey.
“Children are being shot at at school,” he said in an interview. “Books are banned. These are matters that concern them.”
Verjeana McCotter-Jacobs, chief executive of the National School Boards Association, said she and her organization strongly supported increasing the voice of young people in education decision-making.
But she said it’s just as important to educate younger voters about the voting process, to ensure that adults eager to co-opt a new bloc of voters don’t use the newly eligible 16- and 17-year-olds to “sell their vote.” push’. own agenda.”
“It’s not enough to say that 16- and 17-year-olds vote,” agreed Paula L. White, executive director of JerseyCAN, a New Jersey group that advocates for better public schools and includes many leaders in the charter school community. to finish. About a third of Newark’s students attend public charter schools.
“Democracy is based on an educated population,” said Ms. White, who founded a charter school in Newark and the “chief turnaround officer” at the New Jersey Department of Education during the administration of former Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican now running for president.
“This should also encourage citizenship education.”
Breanna Campbell, 16, is among a group of students who have pushed the Newark City Council to embrace the lowered voting age. When talking about issues important to her, she mentions adding International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement classes, improving extracurricular options and reducing gun violence near schools.
Mussab Ali, a former school board chairman in Jersey City, NJ, and a 2023 graduate of Harvard Law School, was recently named Generation Citizen’s first director. Vote 16 USAa nationwide effort to expand voting rights to younger teens.
Mr. Ali, 26, said he believed Newark was “on the cusp of change” nationally.
“It’s about empowering young people,” he said, “who really have a role to play.”