As voters around the country go to the polls on Super Tuesday, a small town in Vermont, Brattleboro, will become the latest municipality to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections, part of a nascent movement across America to lower the voting age. 

Although, nationally, discussion around young voters has been focused on who they tend to vote for, advocates at Brattleboro say they were more focused on trying to get them invested in their community.

The small town of about 7,300 residents is among the first to implement a rule allowing those ages 16 and 17 to vote on local issues. Specifically, teenagers will be allowed to both vote in local elections as well as serve as representatives at the town’s annual meeting and as members of the town’s five-member select board if they are elected to that office.

The new rules allowing younger voters were passed last year and initially faced a veto from the Republican governor of Vermont, Phil Scott, before the Democrat-controlled state legislature overrode his veto.

In a letter accompanying his veto, Mr. Scott said, “I believe it is important to encourage young Vermonters to have an interest in issues affecting their schools, their communities, their state and their country.”

“However, I do not support lowering the voting age in Brattleboro, nor lowering the age to run for Town office and sign contracts on behalf of taxpayers,” Mr. Scott said.

Youth voters will also be allowed to vote in the state’s presidential primary if they will be 18 years old by the time of the general election in November, though this is not a product of Brattleboro’s charter change but of a state law passed in 2010.

Despite Mr. Scott’s concern over a 16- or 17-year-old exercising the powers of an elected office, early indicators suggest that not many youth voters will be turning out on March 5.

The Brattleboro Town Clerk’s office tells the Sun that, though youth voters can still register to vote up until election day, there are just 17 people registered to vote who will not be 18 years old by the November general election, and an additional 20 who will be 18 years old by the general election.

For context, there were more than 2,000 voters who turned out at Brattleboro’s 2023 elections and more than 3,000 voters who turned out in the elections at Brattleboro during the 2020 presidential primaries.

Recent national debate around the voting age has been driven principally by the fact that younger voters tend to vote for Democratic candidates, which has led some Republicans like  businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to propose raising the voting age. He said 18-year-olds are not experienced enough to vote.

Yet the organizers behind the initiative to lower the voting age at Brattleboro tell the Sun that they were under no illusions that they would be ushering in some “new liberal wave.” 

Rather, the director of Brattleboro Common Sense, Kurt Daims, tells the Sun that he was hoping that the new rule would get Brattleboro’s youth more interested in civic engagement, saying, “Hardly anybody’s interested — except your run-of-the-mill taxpayer — in the local politics.”

“Brattleboro is the oldest town in the oldest county in the oldest state,” Mr. Daims tells the Sun. “I’m very sad that it’s only 17 people.”

Mr. Daims blames the lack of enthusiasm among students for registering to vote on the state legislature removing what was the most animating factor for students when he was doing research into the topic — being able to vote in school board elections.

“The intent from my angle is that getting more activity invigorates people — having more people involved makes the other more energetic,” Mr. Daims said. 

According to Mr. Daims, another motivation for the campaign going back to its beginning in 2013 was in trying to get young people invested in the town where they grew up.

“I read once that people are most likely to live where they first registered to vote,” Mr. Daims said. “They feel that the community accepts them and cares about what they have to say.”

In this way, Mr. Daims was hoping that youth voting might play a small part in combating the larger issue of young people moving away from Brattleboro, an issue that the town shares with many rural communities in America.

In the backdrop of Brattleboro’s rollout of youth voting, the National Youth Rights Association is pushing for lowering the voting age, though it hasn’t made major inroads in terms of passing the constitutional amendment that would be required to do so.

“There’s some municipal and state level efforts to lower the voting age and some national efforts,” a NYRA board member, Neil Bhateja, tells the Sun  “There’s a difficult process you don’t read about in the history books.”

According to the National Youth Rights Association, only five municipalities across the country have lowered the voting age in local elections to 16, and one, Oakland, California, allows 16-year-olds to vote in school board elections.

Mr. Bhateja says that lowering the voting age has had some limited success when it’s come before Congress, even picking up a vote from Congressman Michael Burgess, who is a Republican. 

Mr. Bhateja had two main points to make to people who are skeptical of the idea. First, young people pay taxes like sales tax and income tax but cannot vote. Second, he says, “young people are affected the longest by what the country does now.”

“If politicians in their 70s and 80s decide to destroy the environment, it’s young people that are going to have to live in that environment,” Mr. Bhateja says. “If the country racks up a massive national debt, it’s young people that are going to have to pay that off.” 

Other countries like Brazil and Austria have also lowered their voting ages to 16. Argentina even allows 15-year-olds to vote in primaries if they will be 16 by the general election.

In terms of the partisan breakdown of the youth vote, Mr. Bahajeta says, “I think even now young people are up for grabs.”

“It’s discouraging whenever an issue like this becomes partisan and it doesn’t have to be,” he says. “I would encourage both parties to fight for the votes of young people.”