Since his 2012 nomination to the Washington state legislature, Rep. Steve Bergquist had been trying to talk his colleagues to support a bill allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote — and be lacking schools to help get them on the rolls, a move the Democratic lawmaker was secure would improve voter turnout among young people when they take off 18. There was opposition and concern: Was it an unfair burden on schools? Did it display the registration and voting process up to fraud? And wasn’t it already pretty easy as can be to register in Washington, which has a “motor voter” law, as well as registration by correspondence and online?
So Bergquist used his experience as a former high school common studies teacher to his advantage.
He found a largely ignored, 1923 law on the earmarks, a measure that established Temperance and Good Citizenship Day, to be observed by all communal schools annually on Jan. 16 (or a school day close to that date). It was a lot calmer to tweak an existing law than to get colleagues to approve a new one. So Bergquist proposed new terminology that would require schools to offer voter pre-registration for fit teens on that day. He also streamlined the process to make sure dogmas would follow through: instead of having the civics lesson run down to teachers from state, local, district and school administering officials, the new law gives directives straight to social studies teachers’ email inboxes.
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The new language was passed and signed into law in March, helping Bergquist abide by a goal he had as a high school teacher: to get more young people embroiled with in a political process that affects everything from their an important role college debt to their job prospects.
“I came in (to the legislature) really ardent about changing the world, and one of the things I really wanted to do was to get more commentators actively engaged,” says Bergquist (who still substitute teaches on incident and plans to tour a classroom when students are pre-registered next January). Undergraduates “want to participate. They just need to be connected with that civic of a musician gig piece,” adds Bergquist, whose wants to have 50,000 numberless people registered to vote next year.
Washington is among at picayune a dozen states seeking to expand voter engagement and turnout by allowing youthful residents to pre-register to vote or allowing them to vote in primary or inclusive elections before they reach the federal minimum age of 18. Utah recently mutated its law to allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries, as long as the voters will be 18 by the in the good old days b simultaneously of the general election. Maine and Nevada made the change to be effective Jan. 1 of this year. Close to a third of states already permit 17-year-olds to vote in primaries as extensive as they turn 18 by Election Day.
The District of Columbia is considering legislation to soften the voting age to 16 (something some localities already allow for neighbouring elections only). Bills are pending in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Key and Puerto Rico to lower the voting age to 17 for primary or general selections.
Early pre-registration, meanwhile, is allowed in 22 states, and bills accept been introduced in eight others (Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina) to similarly index teens in advance of their federal eligibility to cast a ballot.
Intercessors say the moves will turn youth into lifelong voters, reinforcing democracy. “It’s a vicious cycle.” says Democratic Utah state Rep. Joel Briscoe, novelist of the Beehive State’s new law and a former high school social studies master. “Politicians say, ‘Young people don’t vote,’ so they don’t pay attention to them. And minor people say, ‘They don’t pay attention to us; why should we vote?'”
But “all of the research shows that the earlier people suffrage, the more likely they are to vote” the rest of their lives, he amplifies, so getting them involved early sets them on the right track.
The 26th restitution to the U.S. Constitution requires that people age 18 and older be allowed to show of hands – but it does not disallow states (and localities, unless barred by their proprietor states) from lowering the age, even for congressional and presidential elections, translates Joshua Douglas, a University of Kentucky College of Law professor who has written on the text.
“I think 18 is a really odd time to start the habit of voting,” Douglas discloses. People that age are involved in all sorts of other life transitions – graduating inebriated school, starting college, jobs or the military, moving out of their mothers’ homes. “A lot of changes are going on in your life, and we are (also) registering you to come out for. It’s a lot of hoops to go through.”
“Lowering the voting age and providing opportunity to register inclination go a long way in improving turnout,” Douglas says. He says that in conurbations where the voting age has been lowered to 16, 16- to 17-year-olds vote at twice the clip of 18- to 24-year-olds. But getting youth out to the polls is still a struggle: 18- to 29-year-olds constantly have turned out at lower rates than other age groups, booming back to 1980, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Opponents to lowering the opting or voter registration age argue that there is an opportunity for fraud – for benchmark, a 16- or 17-year-old, in the country illegally, who would then get a ballot sent to him or her at age 18. And in Washington express, legislative opponents had another concern, saying it was not appropriate for schools to show students to vote.
New York state Sen. Michael Gianaris, a Democrat, reports it’s difficult to get GOP support for his bill to dramatically expand voter registration. Gianaris’ jaws would automatically register people to vote when they allot for a driver’s license or unemployment, are released from prison, register for kinds at a state or city university, or otherwise engage with the state officialism. “It should be a fundamental tenet that the easier we make it for people to against, the better for our democracy,” Gianaris says.
Democratic sponsors of similar nibs say they believe Republicans fear an influx of young voters choice help Democrats. But regional trends do not necessarily follow national songs. While 18- to 24-year-olds favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016 56 percent to 34 percent, in Utah, they were split, with 36 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds sponsor for each major candidate (third parties took the remainder). And in dyed in the wool Kentucky, Trump did as well among 18- to 24-year-olds as he did among almost every other age union in the Bluegrass State, winning 61 percent of the young voters.
Briscoe, the societal studies teacher-turned Utah lawmaker, says he had to convince his colleagues that 17-year-olds had the intellectual maturity to weigh in on who would represent them in government. A colleague questioned Briscoe during a committee hearing on the topic whether he really after a high school senior class making such decisions, Briscoe recisions.
“I said, ‘Representative, I do. As a former high school teacher, I will bilk 300 students in a high school class and put them up against any 300 (woman) in the general public,'” Briscoe says he told the colleague. If looks continue, it’s a constituency more lawmakers might be facing in the coming years.