Historic vote empowers young people in Newark | Opinion

January 15, 2024

By: Yael Bromberg

Read the original on NJ.com

Youth voting rights advocates from Vote 16 New Jersey, a project of Generation Citizen, NJ Institute for Social Justice, ACLU of New Jersey, The Gem Project, NJ State Conference NAACP Youth and College, and The Andrew Goodman Foundation, following a successful, unanimous city council vote to expand the franchise to 16-year-olds for school board races in Newark on January 11, 2024. Courtesy of Yael Bromberg.

Newark City Council passed a historic ordinance last week to lower the voting age to 16 for school board races, enfranchising an estimated 7,000 new voters. The measure marks the largest municipal expansion of the youth vote in the United States since the ratification of the 26th Amendment over 50 years ago.

In doing so, Newark joins the ranks of some 25 countries around the globe and a few handfuls of smaller U.S. municipalities.

I was privileged to testify at Newark City Hall in favor of the proposal, and more importantly, I was captivated by the inspiring remarks offered by youth advocates and their allies, including those shared by city council members following their unanimous approval of the new law.

The Vote 16 measure sets a new mark in the nation’s — and our state’s — arc toward a more inclusive suffrage. New Jersey earlier this year joined 19 states in the nation in allowing 17-year-olds to participate in primary elections if they will be 18 by the general election.

Also, this week, Gov. Phil Murphy echoed his continued support for Same Day Registration (SDR) during his 2024 State of the State Address. SDR is a crucial, common sense, long-stalled bill already in effect in half the nation which benefits all voters, and especially youth — 22% of rejected New Jersey provisional ballots in the 2008 general election were cast by youth whose vote would have been safely and securely counted with SDR.

The themes animating the cross-partisan, record-speed ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971 were evident in Newark City Hall in its expansion of the youth vote for school board races:

1. The value of idealism, courage, and moral purpose that youth provide in reenergizing the practice of democracy;

2. The increased political competency of young people compared to prior generations, particularly in light of greater access to information due to the popularization of television and the standardization of public education in the 1900s;

3. The increased adult responsibilities assumed by the group;

4. The general recognition of the nation’s expansion toward a more inclusive and reflective democracy;

5. Stemming unrest by encouraging institutionalized mechanisms to advance change.

Fast forward 50 years and living room television sets are now on handheld devices in our pockets. Adult responsibilities persist for youth; indeed state law allows 16-year-olds to work, pay taxes and drive with accompaniment.

Particularly in school board decisions, high schoolers are beholden to policies that directly impact them, be it proposed gender policies that threaten long-term mental health risks or the lived reality of the school-to-prison pipeline and the lifelong risks of early entanglement.

Simply put, those directly impacted by these policies deserve a say in who is elected to shape them. More, studies show that voting is a habit, and that lowering the voting age increases overall turnout and creates a new cohort of lifelong voters. It only makes sense that supporting youth voting in an education-friendly environment encourages responsible citizenship.

As always, implementation will be key – where most successful, measures to lower the youth vote are accompanied by robust mandatory civics education programs that include voter registration as a part of the curriculum, and where teams of students and school employees are designated and empowered with actual resources to support peer engagement.

The demand for reliable youth voter information is particularly strong in this day of age, when voters of all ages are so readily captured by misinformation and disinformation, including via social media by foreign governments such as China and Russia.

Albeit temporarily, New Jersey boasted the highest youth voter turnout in the nation in 2020 (67%) following the state’s embrace of election modernization during a global pandemic. We would do well to adopt a comprehensive multi-pronged approach to youth voter empowerment, which includes uniform preregistration, securing on-campus polling locations, designating colleges as public agencies covered by the National Voter Registration Act, and much more.

Several of these measures can be found in the federal Youth Voting Rights Act, comprehensive legislation I helped architect to enforce the promise of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. Young people have always written the Story of America with multi-generational support. As evident in Newark last week, they continue to write the Story today.

Yael Bromberg Esq. is a constitutional rights attorney and principal at Bromberg Law LLC, counsel to Weisman & Mintz LLC. and a Rutgers Law lecturer of election law and democracy. She serves on the national cross-partisan advisory council of American Promise, as a visiting associate of the Eagleton Institute of Politics, and is a continued collaborator with the Harvard Kennedy School William Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice.