Four years after Oakland approved a measure to lower the voting age in school board elections, the Town’s 16- and 17-year-olds appear to be on the cusp of casting their first votes this November. The final hurdles include testing and finalizing the changes to the voting systems and a few legal formalities for Oakland, Berkeley, and Alameda County to approve.
Over the past several months, a coalition of youth leaders from various community organizations in Oakland and their adult allies has pressured the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to ensure that Measure QQ is implemented this year. The group has worked to create a voter education curriculum to be used in high school classrooms this fall, and it has shown up at community events to register more people to vote and inform them about the youth vote measure.
Across the country, initiatives to enfranchise teen voters in school board races have been gaining momentum. Twelve jurisdictions, including Oakland and Berkeley—which passed Measure Y1 in 2016 but has yet to implement it—have lowered the voting age to 16 in some races. Oakland would be the largest city so far to implement a youth voting initiative, and youth leaders and their supporters around the country are looking to Oakland as an example that could inspire more cities to follow suit, said Andrew Wilkes, the chief policy and advocacy officer for Generation Citizen, which runs a national campaign to lower the voting age to 16 in local elections.
“Oakland and Berkeley have lowered the voting age and are rounding the corner on implementation,” Wilkes told The Oaklandside. “The country is watching, and young people are watching. Once it happens, it’ll be a bright spot for a very complex year in democracy.”
In Oakland, the youth vote measure passed in 2020 with two-thirds approval (it needed only a simple majority) but has since run into roadblocks with the technical implementation, a lack of funding to support the changes, little urgency from the registrar’s office, and some opposition from those who feel teenagers aren’t mature enough to cast real votes. Young people in Oakland have taken the lead on keeping pressure on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to ensure Measure QQ is implemented this year, and in the meantime they have held their own school board forums and mock votes.
The coalition has also been in public raising awareness at various community events with voter registration tables and pamphlets about the initiative to keep attention on the issue.
“Students are driving, they have jobs while they’re in school, they’re working towards their future. That shows they aren’t naive,” said Cristal Barroso, a rising junior at Oakland High School who was tabling at Town Nights in Fruitvale last week. “People think we’re too naive, but we’ve been fighting for this.”
In March, members of the coalition also mobilized to go to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors meeting and press officials on the lack of implementation.
“We all got to say how we truly felt. A lot of us were very frustrated that Measure QQ still hasn’t been implemented, even though it was passed in 2020. We were able to give powerful public comments that really moved the board of supervisors,” said Katie Liang, a 16-year-old incoming senior at Oakland High School.
Technological changes must be tested first
Oakland Unified School District hired two consultants, Ross Underwood and Deborah Seiler, to support the implementation of Measure QQ. For 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, voting systems must be reconfigured to recognize them as valid voters for the specific elections they can vote in, Underwood told The Oaklandside. Then the changes must be tested to make sure the systems remain intact.
“Election systems are complex, and involve a lot of requirements, not just for youth voters to be allowed to vote, but requirements that the software interact with the state system called VoteCal, and tons of federal and state laws,” said Underwood, a former county registrar who also owns an election technology company. “Any changes that are made to meet those requirements have to be thoroughly tested to make sure that we’re not breaking something else by introducing these new capabilities in the system.”
Right now, the Alameda County systems are in the development-and-testing phase, and testing must be completed by the end of July for the changes to be in place for the November election for teen voters in Oakland and Berkeley, Underwood said. The testing is proceeding on schedule, and Underwood is confident that it will be done in time.
Developing a voter education curriculum
In the four years since Measure QQ passed, many of the students who fought to get it on the ballot in 2020 have graduated and moved on. Members of the coalition realized a need for a voter education curriculum, because the 16- and 17-year-olds who’ll enter the voting booths in November would have been in middle school when the initiative passed.
“We want youth to know about the campaign that led to the Oakland youth vote, and that anytime there are big victories and rights won, it’s because a group of people fought for them,” said Sara Tiras, director of the Oakland Youth Commission. “We wanted Oakland youth to be proud of the movement of other Oakland youth before them that fought for this.”
Tiras, a former high school government teacher, and Domenichi Morris, a lead organizer with Oakland Kids First, led the curriculum development. It includes a week’s worth of lessons intended for high school humanities and social studies teachers, covering Measure QQ and how it passed, the school board and what school board directors have power over, ranked-choice voting, and how to cast a vote in Oakland.
Jenell Marshall volunteered to pilot the curriculum in her advisory class at MetWest High School this year. She taught it to ninth graders, who were largely uninformed about the role and importance of the school board. The board’s main charges are to balance and approve a budget, hire and evaluate the superintendent, and set school district policy.
“Once they started seeing that, I saw the wheels turning. They didn’t know how much power the school board had,” Marshall told The Oaklandside. “We’re telling the students: ‘This is how you make change. If you can get people in who will listen to you, or who you feel will have your voice in their ear, they can make a difference.’”
The curriculum is intended to be taught during High School Voter Education Week, which the OUSD school board established as the last two weeks in September and April. The coalition is planning professional development sessions for teachers in August and September so they can become more familiar with the curriculum, which will be available on the Oakland youth vote website.
What else needs to happen?
The Oakland City Council must still pass an ordinance amending the city charter to allow 16- and 17-year olds to vote in school board elections. That resolution is scheduled for a city council committee meeting this month before going to the full council. Once the council signs off, Alameda County, Oakland, Berkeley, Berkeley Unified, and Oakland Unified must enact agreements to conduct the youth voting.
This fall, four seats on the OUSD board will be up for election, in the odd-numbered districts. Of the incumbents, Director Sam Davis in District 1 has announced he will not be running again. All four of the races have attracted challengers, according to the city elections website.
It’s difficult to measure how many 16- and 17-year-olds would be enfranchised this year. Underwood, the elections consultant, said there are about 1,200 youths who have pre-registered to vote with the state. Across Oakland Unified, including in charter schools, there were about 7,200 10th and 11th graders enrolled during the 2023-2024 school year. In 2020, the last time these seats were up during a regular election year, the differences between the top two vote-getters ranged from fewer than 1,000 votes to nearly 5,000.
“Having a say in our school district is so important. Our generation, youth, has a lot to say about how we want our school system to be and who we want to represent us,” said Liang, who lives in District 5. “I hope that, in this upcoming election, youth will have a say and show a difference in the results.”
