Could 16 and 17 year olds in Los Angeles be given the right to vote in LAUSD elections?
It’s crunch time at the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission, and there’s a long-shot idea that some groups are rallying behind to lower the voting age for school board elections to 16.
While it has had relatively little air time compared to other topics – such as expanding the number of members on the Los Angeles City Council – the idea has bubbled up just as the panel is set to select topics to include in a final package of recommendations to send to the City Council.
Earlier this week, commissioners of the panel’s Government Structure Committee moved forward with a set of proposals that include recommending that the charter be changed in Los Angeles to give people younger than 18 the right to vote in municipal and LAUSD elections.
This means that the idea of lowering the voting age in Los Angeles will be in the running when a newly formed ad hoc committee of the Charter Reform Commission meets Saturday to begin slashing away at the list of proposals to send to the City Council to consider for this November’s ballot. Given the many other hefty topics that have already taken up center stage, the chances for this idea might be low. But supporters of the idea are giving it shot.
And they are arguing that lowering the voting age would help build muscles for civic engagement at an earlier age — and based on research they point to, young people are cognitively ready to vote by the age of 16. They also argue this would not be untested waters, with Berkeley and Oakland recently giving 16 and 17 year olds the right to vote in school board elections. As for municipal elections, advocacy groups point to successes especially on the east coast, with Takoma Park, Maryland first to give 16 year olds the vote back in 2013.
The idea had initially hit upon skepticism from charter reform commissioners, including Diego Andrades, who pointed to polling that showed that at least nationally, voters don’t favor lowering the voting age. He had expressed concerns that if voters don’t like this particular proposal, it would tank others packaged with it on a ballot measure this November. There also hadn’t been groups actively pushing for the proposal until recently.
Andrades, who is on the ad hoc panel, has recently warmed up to the idea, and was part of the committee that advanced the proposal. And part of the reason may be that groups pushing for lowering the voting age have coalesced around pushing more narrowly for it to happen just for LAUSD board elections.
Advocates argue that not only does it make intuitive sense — young people going to school everyday may have better insight and expertise than most adults as to what is best for their school district — they point out that lowering the voting age in LAUSD elections is a question that must go onto its own measure, separate from charter reform proposals that affect LA city government.
Several groups have also signed onto a letter that supports lowering the voting age to 16 for LAUSD elections. Those groups include the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles, Fair Rep LA, Cal RCV (they support ranked choice voting) and Vote16USA, a national organization that advocates for expanding voting to 16 and 17 year olds.
Fair Rep LA, a volunteer group that has closely monitored the commission proceedings, submitted a research brief this past week aimed at providing some data, including scientific data on the cognitive capabilities of 16 year olds, as a way to push back on common assumptions around giving younger people the vote.
The Fair Rep LA research brief pointed to three reasons that giving young people the right to vote could address voting-related inequities. It points to LAUSD’s 90% population of non-White students who are “denied a direct say in their own education and the decisions that directly affect their lives.” They add that young people who are children of foreign national parents are also unable to get their interests represented in the democratic process. And the children of Black and Latino Californians who are disproportionately disenfranchised by the criminal justice system, don’t tend to have the same voting representation as other children.
Ross Weistroffer, a volunteer with Fair Rep LA who prepared the brief, has spoken several times to the commission about the issue during public comment. In the latest comment, Weistroffer said that civic engagement needs to be practiced and “can teach courage.”
“It takes courage to walk up to this mic for the first time, or to sit down in front of that mic for the first time,” Weistroffer told the panel. “It takes courage to ask tough questions about politics for the first time and to cast a vote for the first time. But then it gets easier. But that self-reinforcing cycle cannot begin without your courage now.”
Some are arguing too that the challenge at the polls may not be as great for the issue as projected. Weistroffer noted that while national polls may indicate a lack of appetite for lowering the vote age, local Los Angeles voting often don’t follow national trends.
And LaJuan Allen, executive director of Vote16USA, says that even though this November will be a midterm election, it is expected to be a high turnout election given the political climate that has built up around the policies and actions coming out of Washington D.C. at the moment. Allen told The LA Reporter in an interview this week that he thinks voters who are believed to be more receptive to the idea of “extending” voting to 16 year olds will be going to the polls in greater numbers than in a typical midterm election cycle.
This wouldn’t be the first time the idea of giving younger people the vote has been entertained in Los Angeles. Before the pandemic, youth advocates had tried to push to get this done for LAUSD elections, with the school board beginning to study it. And a ballot measure to allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote in municipal elections in Culver City failed in 2022.
Charter reform ideas set to be voted off the island, en masse, on Saturday
A dramatic switch-up spearheaded by Charter Reform Commissioner Ted Stein is commencing with a marathon meeting on Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026 of a new ad hoc committee tasked with taking a merciless approach toward chopping down the now voluminous tower of proposals that the commission has kept on the table over the last several months.
Stein, who has expressed concerns that the commission was falling behind on its charge of preparing a final set of recommendations for the City Council by April, will chair this new ad hoc committee which will last for a month and consist of five other members. He has also assure members not on the committee that there is still a chance for some ideas that don’t survive their “electric saw” approach to be brought back from the dead, once they report back to the full commission.
Saturday’s meeting will only cover topics advanced by two of the commission’s four committees. Those committees are the Planning and Infrastructure Committee and the Government Structure Committee. This means that the issues advanced by the Better Government Committee, which has been handling neighborhood council and ethics commission matters, and the Personnel and Budget Committee, which has been taking up police reform, personnel and budget matters, aren’t expected to be considered Saturday.
Some of the big ticket issues going to the ad hoc committee on Saturday include council expansion, which was one of the ideas that the City Council itself had held off making a decision on when it had originally been taken up in their own ad hoc governance committee. Groups pushing for ranked choice voting have also had a steady presence at meetings, and are continuing to push hard to get their proposal past the ad hoc committee round.
The meeting will take place at Los Angeles City Hall, in Room 1010, and is set to last from 9:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. Information about the meeting and materials can be found here.
Fair Rep LA, the volunteer group that’s been following the meetings, released a tracker of proposals earlier this week to help people in following the ad hoc meetings. The group also provided a primer on the commission and what’s happening with the elimination round. A video of that can be found here.
Big turnout for the City Controller’s office in charter face-off
The Charter Reform Commission became a hot topic with the wider public last week when many learned of a proposal by one of the Charter Reform Commissioners to strip the City Controller’s office of all of its accounting duties, and moving them to an office that would likely be under the control of the mayor.
More than 260 people wrote letters and dozens of others crammed into a community room at a public library in North Hollywood, to tell commissioners that they approved of the City Controller’s efforts to provide transparency about city finances, and to leave that office alone.
Their efforts ended up warding off the proposal, for now. The idea had been part of a proposal to put language about an capital infrastructure plan in the charter. That’s a multi-year plan for public projects, such as sidewalks, parks and streets, and it’s something that many major cities already have. It’s possible that the topic could also come up at the ad hoc committee meeting on Saturday.
Read The LA Reporter story for more on this here.
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