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Part of the complexity of achieving this goal is the fact that, unlike nearly every other voting reform in American history (the outlier being the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, which lowered the voting age to 18), people eventually stop being part of the affected group. This reduces motivation to actually make change, so the essential trick is to have people still care once they're of voting age. This, to some extent, requires starting small, on the city or county level; even at this local level, it's inconsistent whether a law passes, and whether it is implemented after that. Ideally, as such local laws are passed, the attention on the issue grows and more people become involved, allowing for certain state laws to be passed (as was attempted, but failed, with California Proposition 18 in 2020). However, all these laws can only focus on certain areas of local elections or primaries. In order to lower the voting age in federal elections, a new amendment to the Constitution would be needed. Since this requires broad state support, a lot of work is needed to inform the population (see target 2).

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It seems important to me to increase awareness of the facts before being able to implement what is a fairly radical change from the current norm. Very few people are fully informed about this issue, and so there is little impetus to shift the status quo. For this reason, I put together a slideshow presentation outlining some of the basic arguments for and against lowering the voting age (and rebuttals for the latter).

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For the first target, I decided to reach out to Mark Numainville, who is the Berkeley City Clerk. In this position, he is in charge of legislative proceedings and manages municipal elections, so he and his office seemed the most likely to be overseeing the appropriate processes. I sent an email to him asking him to clarify what this process is, but have yet to hear back.

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This is a topic about which I already knew a fair deal, but I did still glean some new information over the course of this project. I found that there had been some new legislative action on this issue, including ballot measures in Oakland (which passed), San Francisco, and Culver City (both of which did not), and a constitutional amendment reintroduced in the House. A couple of articles also mentioned that the reason for the delay in implementing Measure Y had to do with producing the necessary ballots, but this answer felt unsatisfactory, so I decided to continue pursuing this further.

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What it essentially comes down to is that politicians and others in power find it easier to maintain a status quo without needing to consider the needs of any new category of people. If younger people were able to vote, candidates for public office would need to appeal to a larger pool with its own set of interests and needs. It's then easier for these individuals to simply block teenagers from having these rights than to actually care about what they think.

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The topic of lowering the voting age has been important to me since sixth grade, which, coincidentally, is when Measure Y was passed in Berkeley. Like a few others in other parts of the country, this legislation allows 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in select local elections (in Berkeley, for school board members). Checking in with this law, as I regularly have over the last nearly seven years, I was disappointed, but not surprised to find that it had not yet been implemented; teenagers remain a suppressed, disenfranchised, and second-class group of citizens (to put it somewhat melodramatically). So, I set out to try to discover what was going on in Berkeley bureaucracy that for there to be such a delay.