Vote16 Palo Alto, the local chapter of the nation-wide effort to lower the voting age to 16, is collecting signatures to put a measure before voters that would lower the municipal voting age to 16. With a deadline of May 2026 to collect roughly 3,000 signatures, founders and Gunn students Iris Blanchet and Rayla Chen are working to rally community support.

So far, Vote16 campaigns in several Maryland and California cities have succeeded. In California, Berkeley and Oakland passed legislation allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in school board elections, while Albany lowered the voting age for municipal elections to 16 in 2024.

In September, the Vote16 Palo Alto campaign published a notice of intent announcing its petition. 

Blanchet said she was inspired to co-found this effort after her experience as an intern for Congressman Sam Liccardo’s campaign in last year’s election.

“I saw all these young interns — high schoolers — being really involved in politics,” Blanchet said. “And I thought, ‘Yeah, these people are definitely mature enough to vote.’”

Before starting the Palo Alto chapter, Blanchet first reached out to the mayor of Takoma Park, Maryland, the first city in the U.S. to lower the voting age for local elections, to learn about the effects of the change. In February, Blanchet and Chen reached out to Vote16 USA. 

“I’m really proud to call ourselves a student-run organization, because this isn’t something that adults are leading,” Blanchet said. “We have a leadership team of students who run the day-to-day operations of Vote 16 Palo Alto.”

Blanchet said the campaign has tabled at community events to raise awareness, including at the No Kings protest last month.

“We pride ourselves on being nonpartisan,” Blanchet said. “But we were also very thankful to be invited to an event about democracy, because our whole goal is expanding democracy to people who are mature enough to vote.” 

Blanchet said many 16- and 17-year-olds are interested in politics, involving themselves in political classes, clubs and organizations, but feel powerless when it comes to elections that decide actual policies and government office holders.

“A lot of the people I talk to are very politically involved, but they don’t feel like they have a voice in our system right now,” Blanchet said. “What we need to do is we need to give these people the tools so that they can be heard.”

Chen said 16- and 17-year olds are fully capable of making rational decisions, citing a 2021 Columbia Justice Lab study on two types of cognitive reasoning.

“Cold cognition is essentially long-term decision making, and that gets developed by the time you’re 15,” Chen said. “So looking at it scientifically, between a 16-and an 18-year-old, there is no difference in the way we think and the way we make our own decisions and whether or not people have influences around us.”

Paly ‘25 alumna Briar Dorogusker, who conducted an Advanced Authentic Research project on the impacts of lowering the voting age, said one of her main findings was its aid in building better voting habits.

“If you start something younger, it’s a lot easier to be able to set that up as something that you do throughout life,” Dorogusker said. “The first time I could vote, I was in college. If you’re able to vote when you’re 16, you’ll be at home. You’ll have more support systems through your family and through school.”

Dorogusker said many local elections directly impact younger voters, especially school board elections, but most high schoolers don’t get a chance to vote in them.

“Even if you are 18 your senior year, by the time you elect someone, and then they get sworn in, they’re sworn in in January, and then you graduate six months later,” Dorogusker said. “So if you lower the voting age to 16, there is a chance that you actually are able to have more of an impact on your education and more current policy.”

Senior Jazmyn Seeger, though, said she is concerned that families could potentially sway younger voters’ decisions.

“I don’t think a 16-year-old is developed enough to have their own opinions that aren’t influenced by others around them,” Seeger said.

While some argue younger voters could be influenced by their families, Dorogusker said that is true for all voters.

“In the research that I did, most people did get a lot of their voting information and influence on what they believe from their family, and that’s pretty consistent across all age groups,” Dorogusker said. “Even if you’re 30, the people you’re surrounding yourself with really do influence your voting habits and who you vote for and what you vote for.”

Still, Dorogusker said she discovered no significant developmental differences between 16- and 18-year-olds in her research.

“The only real difference is the experiences you’ve been through,” Dorogusker said. “Eighteen is quite arbitrary.”

U.S. Government teacher Austin Davis said he has held discussions in his class about lowering the federal voting age, and he can see both sides of the issue.

“Some of the arguments in favor were that young people are affected by policies passed by the government, and that they should have a say, and that many times the youth voice is unheard,” Davis said. “On the flip side, some students thought that young people who are 16 are just not yet educated enough about life and policy and economic realities to really make decisions.”

Davis also said civic engagement can be complicated by misinformation and biases for voters in any age group.

“Adults are often voting based on party identification or whoever their friends and family have picked,” Davis said. “So if the argument against young people voting is they’re not educated enough, or they’re not well informed enough, I think that’s a weak argument. A lot of uninformed adults who have the right to vote can also have the same problem.”

Davis said most California school districts offer a U.S. Government course to seniors, who can soon after apply what they learn by voting, but PAUSD is an exception.

Since PAUSD requires all students to take a U.S. Government course during their sophomore year, Palo Alto students may get an early advantage in learning about elections.

“Here, you take government as sophomores,” Davis said. “So I can see why a local organization is advocating for this right earlier, because you’re getting the training to what you’re supposed to get in government class, and a large part is civic engagement.”

In a survey Dorogusker sent out to PAUSD students, 84% said they would vote if given the opportunity, but only 57% said they think 16-year-olds should be allowed to vote in local elections. She also posed free-response questions about why participants thought 16-year-olds may or may not be able to vote.

“For the most part, people talked about how they felt themselves prepared, but they acknowledged that other people may not be as prepared,” Dorogusker said. “One really easy way to fix this is in school: having more resources to help people know where to register to vote or give opportunities to have a ballot drop-off place in Palo Alto or at Paly.”

In the end, senior Isabella Nunez said if the voting age is lowered, younger voters need to be politically informed on the issues they vote on.

“It really depends on how involved 16-year-olds are with politics and the government,” Nunez said. “I would hope that only the people that knew about the government and politics would vote.”

Nevertheless, Nunez said she thinks high schoolers are able to form their own political opinions, and the school should offer more resources to prepare to vote.

“At this age, you should already have an idea of your morals, your values and what you believe in,” Nunez said.

Davis said teens interested in becoming more politically informed should also get in the habit of consuming news about different sides of political issues and challenge the information they hear.

“Oftentimes, we get our ideas about politics from our friends or family without really taking the time to consider why these ideas make sense, why they don’t make sense,” Davis said. “And that’s a question that we should follow: ‘Why does it make sense to do that? Let me investigate, let me try to understand’ … because that’s what democracy is supposed to do. It’s supposed to be chaotic, confusing, complicated, because you have all these different voices that all have the same right to participate.”