Join the Vote 16 Spring Meeting! (Thursday 3/28 at 3:30 pm ET)
2024 has already been a *huge* year for the Vote 16 movement in the United States and around the world. Join the Vote 16 Research Network for our spring meeting to make sense of it all.
Dear Friends,
Our Vote 16 Research Network Spring meeting is coming up this Thursday 3/28 at 3:30 pm ET. I hope you will join us!
Here is the zoom link we will use to get together: https://umd.zoom.us/j/6911098822
We have a LOT to talk about because 2024 has been a HUGE year for Vote 16 in the United States (and around the world).
2024 has been already been a huge year for Vote 16.
On January 2nd, 2024 Mussab Ali started as director of Vote 16 USA. Mussab is an incredible leader who graduated from Harvard Law School in 2023 (where he was student body president!) and was a Truman Scholar as an undergrad at Rutgers-Newark. In 2017, he was elected at the age of 20 to serve on the Jersey City School Board. He was elected president of the Jersey City School Board in 2021 and served in that role until the end of 2022. Mussab’s leadership is already transforming the Vote 16 movement in the United States!
On January 9th, 2024 New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy used his state of the state address to recognize Vote 16 NJ leaders Anjali Krishnamurti and Yenjay Hu and ask “the Legislature to send to my desk a voting rights bill that would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local school board elections.”
On January 10th, 2024 the Newark City Council passed a resolution to lower the voting age to 16 in Newark school board elections.
On January 11th, 2024 the Maryland town of Cheverly passed a charter amendment lowering the voting age to 16 for municipal elections.
On March 5th, 2024 16- and 17-year-olds in Brattleboro Vermont went to vote for the first time since their city lowered the voting age to 16 last summer.
And in Australia, the Make It 16 Australia campaign announced a nationwide Vote 16 movement summit in Canberra to be held April 13th - 16th 2024.
We have packeed agenda for the Spring 2024 Vote 16 Research Network Meeting!
At the Vote 16 Research Network, we have been doing our best to help you all make sense of these exciting Vote 16 developments across America and the world! Our spring meeting on Thursday 3/28 will include several key agenda items.
1) Updates from local Vote 16 campaigns across the United States.
Earlier this month, we published an important analysis about how the Vote 16 movement can follow in the footsteps of the successful woman suffrage movement in the United States by finding opportunities to advocate for and implement Vote 16 policies at the local and state level. At our meeting this Thursday, Mussab Ali from Vote 16 USA will join along with local partners and share updates about the health of the Vote 16 movement nationwide and several important local Vote 16 campaigns including the following exciting efforts:
The Vote 16 Missouri campaign which is on the cusp of passing a Vote 16 policy in Kansas City (MO).
Two exciting efforts in California including the work of Vote 16 Culver City to put a Vote 16 ballot question on the 2024 Culver City Ballot and a new Vote 16 campaign in Albany California which is scheduled to receive a city council vote on March 26.
The Vote 16 DC campaign led by DC Action which continues to prepare to bring a new measure to the city council to lower the voting age in our nation’s capital.
2) Previewing research priorities for the rest of 2024!
We have several exciting research priorities that we are preparing to present at this meeting.
Distributing and improving Vote 16 implementation guides for local election officials: Timely implementation of Vote 16 policy has been a persistent challenge. 16- and 17-year-olds in Berkeley and Oakland have still not voted despite the passage of a Vote 16 measure there in 2020. In Newark, the city has delayed the entire school board election until 2025 in order to give local election officials more time to prepare. In response to these implementation challenges, the Vote 16 Research Network worked alongside youth advocates and local election officials with experience implementing Vote 16 to publish a Vote 16 Implementation Guide last month. Jared McDonald from University of Mary Washington will join us on Thursday to share an update on his work to make a version of the Vote 16 Implementation Guide specifically for large election jurisdictions that can speak to some of their unique challenges implementing Vote 16 policy.
Pushing the frontiers of Vote 16 messaging with message testing. The Vote 16 Research Network has done important work over the last 3 years to conduct message tests to see whether Americans are open to lowering the voting age. Last month, we published the results of the new study that confirmed past findings and showed that multiple messages can move Americans to support Vote 16. Dr. McDonald will also share some updates from new testing he has been doing to see how much support for Vote 16 drops when Americans encounter negative messages about Vote 16. This study is providing valuable new insights into the psychological barriers that prevent many Americans from supporting Vote 16 policies in their communities.
Establishing a clearer understanding of American public opinion about Vote 16: Earlier this month we published the results of a statewide poll in Maryland that provides important information about which populations are most likely to support Vote 16 policies and which communities are most likely to adopt a Vote 16 policy. Through the rest of 2024, we are working with partners to track down raw data from past public opinion surveys so we can track trends over time and synthesize the themes that emerge from various polls about Vote 16. I will also share some updates about the work we are doing to explore a new Vote 16 poll in New Jersey.
Seeing if learning impact from Vote 16 observed in other countries is replicated in the United States: Founding Vote 16 Research Network member Laura Wray-Lake from UCLA is developing an important survey that will allow us to see if some of the civic learning impact of Vote 16 policy that Jan Eichorn has documented in Scotland replicates in a U.S. context. Dr. Wray-Lake is particularly interested in partnerships with some of the larger communities that are implementing Vote 16 policies where there is significant or complete overlap between the municipality with a Vote 16 policy and a school district serving those 16- and 17- year-old voters.
3) Learning from other Modern American Suffrage Movements
Young people are not the only group pushing for expanded suffrage in the United States. There are movements pushing for voting rights for non-citizens, people currently incarcerated or disenfrachised for past felony convictions, and other groups that are still not included in American democracy. There is lots of important learning that the Vote 16 community can do by engaging with these other Modern American Suffrage Movements. Vote 16 advocates often are dealing with similar challenges related to the legal rights of municipalities to set the rules for local elections, public opinion, targeting, implementation, and long term coalition strategy. In many cases, they are even engaging with the same cities and partners as other Modern American Suffrage Movements.
At the Vote 16 Research Network Spring Meeting on Thursday 3/28, we’re thrilled to welcome Annette Wong and Helen Ho who have been deeply involved with efforts to implement non-citizen voting in San Francisco. There are numerous cities that have both non-citizen voting and Vote 16 in some form including Takoma Park MD, Hyattsville MD, Mount Rainier MD, Somerset MD, and Oakland CA. Just this week, Washington DC - a place with a very active Vote 16 campaign - cleared a major legal hurdle in their effort to implement the D.C. Non-Citizen Voting Act which passed the D.C. City Council in 2022. We are also thrilled to welcome Dr. Ron Hayduk from San Francisco State University to the Vote 16 Research Network. Dr. Hayduk is a leading scholar studying non-citizen voting efforts in the United States and his 2006 book Democracy For All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States is a definitive historical account of non-citizen voting rights in the United States.
What an exciting time! Join us 3/28!
It truly is such an amazing time to be engaged with the Vote 16 Research Network. Please join us on 3/28 for our spring meeting and pass this note along to others who might be interested! If you can’t make it, reply to this email or send me an email at snovey@umd.edu with your thoughts and ideas. We’d love to learn and grow with you in 2024!
Sam Novey is Chief Strategist at the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement.