Culver City voters to decide if 16-, 17-year-olds may vote

Audio By Carbonatix

(The Center Square) – Culver City voters on Tuesday will decide whether 16- and 17-year-olds may vote in local races.

Measure YV would allow 16- and 17-year-olds in the city in the Los Angeles area to vote in municipal contests. That would include races for city council and school board, as well as local ballot measures.

Supporters of the measure argue that local policy decisions directly impact high school students, many of whom work, pay taxes and drive on local roads.

"The science says that 16-year-olds have the cognitive ability to vote in the same way that an 18-year-old would," Alice Blakely, communications manager for Vote16 Culver City, told The Center Square.

Blakely, a junior at Culver City High School, cited developmental concepts such as "cold cognition"— the process of deliberating over time to make reasoned decisions — as support for why teenagers are capable of making informed choices at the ballot box.

"A lot of Culver City teens drive, work, pay taxes, and we go to the Culver City schools, so we think it's fair that we get a say in our local politics," Blakely said.

This is not the first time the proposition has come before voters. A similar measure on the 2022 municipal ballot fell short by 16 votes. Since then, student advocacy groups have organized community events, including an October town hall featuring regional officials, and conducted door-to-door canvassing in the city of roughly 40,000 residents.

If the measure passes, Los Angeles County election administrators would determine if a separate ballot would be needed for 16- and 17-year-olds, who would only be able to vote in municipal and school board races, said LaJuan Allen, executive director of Vote16USA, a national organization advocating for extending voting rights.

While advocates view the effort as a natural extension of civic participation, critics argue that lowering the voting age undermines long-standing legal standards regarding maturity and adult responsibility.

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom and former counsel to the assistant attorney general overseeing civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, called the proposal a bad policy.

"Teenagers have neither the experience nor the judgment or emotional maturity to make important political decisions in the voting booth," von Spakovsky said in an email to The Center Square. "It is that lack that is the reason we don't allow teenagers to sign a lease or a contract, serve on a jury, buy a lottery ticket, or get married."

Von Spakovsky added that societal age thresholds for military service, contract law and tobacco sales exist because minors have not yet fully developed the judgment necessary for decisions impacting society at large.

"Supporters of lowering the voting age to 16 cannot justify doing so unless they also agree to lower the age for all of these other things, too," he said.

Advocates push back against claims that teenagers are too easily influenced or uninterested in policy matters, noting that political messages are already pervasive in young people's lives.

"We grow up in a world where everything is so politicized that we're not being left alone as it is right now," Blakely said. "So we might as well give them a voice to express themselves."

If passed, Culver City would join a small but growing list of municipalities across the nation that allow 16- and 17-year-olds to participate in local or school board elections. This includes Albany, Berkeley, and Oakland, three cities in Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area. They'll vote for the first time in school board races in Tuesday's election, according to the county's election website.

The other cities are in Maryland, New Jersey and Vermont.