Lowering the Voting Age Can Instill Civic Responsibility in Youth
By: Anya Khera
Since 2023, I have been involved with Vote16, a movement focused on extending voting rights to 16- and 17-year-old eligible voters at the municipal level (Vote16USA). A teenager myself, I connected with this work because I believe strongly in youth political participation, as we are the citizens who will ultimately inherit and lead our societies. Vote16 supports youth citizenry by enabling our representation at the polls, which is meaningful even at the limited local level, and by providing us practical civics education, which can motivate greater engagement for life. Moreover, it embeds the youth experience in society’s laws and regulations and adds a constituency to increase overall voter participation.
In my work to date with the Vote16 movement, I have connected with many supporters, as well as critics who often cite challenges with youth political interest, civic education, and cognition. To objectively assess voter sentiment and understand the arguments for and against the movement, I led a post-election survey with YouGov. This included three questions covering U.S. adults’ propensity to vote in local elections at 16, if it had been allowed when they were that age, and perceived benefits and challenges in doing so. The survey showed that 40% of U.S. adults, and higher percentages of younger adults, would have voted in municipal elections at the ages of 16 and 17, if it had been permitted. This figure is significant, as it is more than double the average voter participation in state and municipal elections.
For this piece, I compared results from the aforementioned YouGov survey on Vote16 with CIRCLE’s post-election survey questions about youth motivations to vote. My conclusion from this analysis is that Vote16 legislation would support increased youth voter turnout. For both data sets, I focused on the younger cohort of voting-eligible U.S. adults, aged 18-34. According to the CIRCLE results, a majority of young people who cast ballots in the 2024 elections were motivated to vote by a sense of duty and responsibility, as well as interest in community affairs. These are values that can be encouraged through Vote16 legislative reform, and were reflected in responses to the Vote16 YouGov survey.
The concepts of duty and responsibility were cited as motivators to youth voting and are natural outgrowths of Vote16 legislation. In aggregate, 40% of young voters in the CIRCLE survey noted “duty and responsibility as a citizen” as a reason they voted in 2024; this was consistent across race, gender, and education level. The YouGov results showed that a similar 40% of younger adults believed voting earlier “trains youth in political participation.”
These are connected concepts. Support for middle and high school civics programs is premised on the belief that an informed citizenry is “more likely to feel a sense of civic responsibility and to participate more actively in their communities.” It follows that Vote16, which teaches young citizens valuable voting principles, mechanics, and rationale, would translate to a lasting sense of civic duty and political participation. Further, young adults in both CIRCLE and YouGov surveys cited habitual practice as a motivator to voting and a benefit of Vote16, respectively. Vote16 enactment can provide the experiential context and practice that motivates voter engagement for life.
Another overlapping concept is local political engagement. According to the CIRCLE survey results, nearly a third of young voters cited community decision-making authority and initiative influence as voting motivators, which corresponds to Vote16 legislation’s municipal scope. Specifically, 20% of young people voted to “impact who is making decisions in my local community,” and 11% voted “to support or oppose a ballot initiative impacting my local community”; both were consistent across race, gender, and education level. This reflects the youth desire to have a voice in their immediate environment.
Vote16 empowers younger (16- and 17-year-old) citizens to vote locally before many relocate to attend college, so it builds on this community relationship to motivate political participation. It is useful to note that the YouGov open-ended responses cited Vote16 benefits of “community involvement” and “encouragement of meaningful dialogue of issues on the local ballot”, further supporting the link. Vote16 can develop community connections into local political engagement, which is an important motivator to youth voting.
The overlap between CIRCLE’s 2024 post-election poll and the commissioned YouGov Vote16 survey results supports the perspective that Vote16 legislative reform can encourage young people to vote. By voting early in life on issues relevant to their immediate surroundings, youth receive digestible training in political participation. They come to appreciate voting as a way to improve their local community conditions, which builds a sense of responsibility to participate broadly and consistently as the scope of their concerns grows in adulthood. Importantly, such engagement can translate to other areas of civic life, such as community organizing and even running for office, which are important ingredients of a well-functioning democracy.
Anya Khera is an young organizer advocating for expanding voting rights at the municipal level to 16- and 17-year-olds. Since 2023, Anya has been involved with Vote16USA and currently serves as Chair of their Youth Advisory Board. In this role, she has worked to connect campaigns nationally, and to raise awareness through primary research, a podcast, and local advocacy.
