Gov. Phil Murphy speaks at the Vote 16 Youth Summit hosted by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice at the Rutgers-Newark campus on Oct. 5, 2024. (Courtesy of Murphy’s office)
Top New Jersey Democrats promised to push legislation lowering the voting age to 16 for school board elections statewide at a teen activist conference at Rutgers’ Newark campus on Saturday.
As book bans and the risks of school shootings have politicized high schools nationwide, dozens of young activists, many of them high school students, gathered at Saturday’s Vote 16 Youth Summit hosted by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.
Governor Phil Murphy, freshly elected Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-10), and state lawmakers voiced their support for the enfranchisement of 16- and 17-year-olds in local school board elections, with state officials promising to move a new enfranchisement bill through the Legislature this year.
Murphy announced his support for such a bill in January, just one day before the Newark City Council passed a law allowing teens 16 and up to cast ballots in school board races. Officials billed the move as a push to boost voter turnout and civic engagement (fewer than 3% of the city’s residents voted in the last school board election).
Democrats brought the statewide bill to the Senate and Assembly in May, but neither chamber has scheduled it for committee hearings. If the bill becomes law, New Jersey would be the first state to extend voting rights to people younger than 18. The nationwide voting age was lowered to 18 by a constitutional amendment in 1971.
Murphy and other leaders said research suggests voting at a young age can build lifelong voting habits, and they dismissed suspicions that youth voting is a partisan move designed to boost Democrats’ numbers.
Speaking at the summit, Murphy praised the activists for their “pluck and determination,” but hinted at resistance from both Republicans and from within his own party.
“This is not going to be an easy mountain to scale to get that law passed and on my desk,” he said.
“Once I sign this legislation into law, each one of you will be able to say that you played a part in making New Jersey the first state in the entire nation to secure voting rights for Americans as young as 16-year-olds,” he added. “It will be an historic accomplishment that began right here, in Newark.”
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, speaking with two children in tow, cited “considerable pushback” against the idea, but said book bans and other problems impacting students necessitated youth enfranchisement. Baraka, a Democrat, is seeking his party’s nomination for governor next year.
McIver, who championed Newark’s youth enfranchisement law during her time as a city council member, called the summit a “full-circle moment.”
“I know it can feel daunting, many of us have been in situations where we feel our voices don’t matter, or the system is too big to change, but I’m here to tell you that together, we can move mountains,” she said.
State Sen. Raj Mukherji (D-Hudson) said he hopes local school board elections are just the start of a youth enfranchisement wave. He noted that naysayers have called the bill a “slippery slope” toward allowing teens to vote in other elections.
“Hell yeah, that’s the point!” he said. “16-, 17-year-olds should be enfranchised, should be able to vote in every election … So let me not sneak that up on you, I want to show you that the sky will not fall when we do it.”
Assemblymember Cleopatra Tucker (D-Essex) related her youth in Birmingham, Alabama, where she was required to pass a literacy test to be added to the voter rolls, to the current push for enfranchisement. She invited the young activists to lobby in Trenton if the bill moves to a committee hearing.
While little opposition was heard at the summit, some speakers tried to preempt criticism of the plan.
Anjali Krishnamurti, a 19-year-old activist who co-founded New Jersey’s chapter of the national Vote16USA campaign as a high schooler, called accusations that the bill is a partisan move “offensive.”
“At 16 and 17, you have your own opinions, you’re developing your own ideas, you’re passionate about this,” she told the crowd. “It’s no partisan ploy at all.”
Research suggests that more than half of teens between 13 and 17 do not identify with any major political party, and that many have adopted the political identities of their parents.
Matthew Bassily, a 17-year-old from Middlesex County, is on Vote16NJ’s engagement team. He cited COVID-19 and the conflict in Gaza as issues motivating teens to seek voting rights.
“Obviously, I feel like being in high school is just a completely different environment today than it was even like five, ten years ago,” he said. “We have so many life-changing political events that are happening.”
It remains unclear how school board campaigning may change with newly enfranchised young people — Newark’s 16- and 17-year-olds will vote in their first school board elections in April 2025 — but Bassily said he’d sensed building political focus on younger generations.
“I feel like campaigning to younger people is definitely something that we’re seeing now, not just on the local level,” he said, citing Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign using references to Charli XCX’s “Brat” album to build a social media following. “Once we are able to have more youth come to the polls, then that’s just going to have an increase in voter turnout, and it’s changing the voting population of the United States.”
Breaking for lunch, the young activists sat at round tables, some with flyers advertising an Essex County commissioner’s social media campaign, with QR codes for her TikTok and Instagram accounts. Vote16’s Spotify playlist, leaning heavily on Chappell Roan and “Brat,” played over the loudspeakers.
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