Youths campaign to have a say: New effort by teens to lower voting age to 17 By Keith O'Brien, Globe Correspondent | November 12, 2006 Election Day has come and gone. Voters have cast their ballots and the candidates have been chosen. But Nephtaly Paul was not part of it. As in every other election in his lifetime, Paul had no say in this one. Still months away from his 18th birthday, the high school senior couldn't vote. Such things might not matter to most teenagers. The 26th Ammendment says they can't vote until they are 18. And few bother to fight it. Voter apathy, it seems, starts young. But not in Cambridge, not among Paul and his friends. There, teenagers have been fighting for years to lower the voting age. And last June, they scored a victory when Cambridge city councilors voted, 8 to 1, in favor of letting 17-year-olds vote in city elections. Paul, a member of the Cambridge Kids Council's youth involvement subcommittee, was thrilled. He recalls how exciting it was to lobby city councilors and later visit Beacon Hill, where the city's petition to lower the voting age had to be approved by state lawmakers before it could become official. "At first I didn't want to do it. I guessit was becauseI was kind of scared or shy," Paul says of speaking in public. "But I just stepped up. I did it. And when I got it over with -- when I was done -- I felt good. We had, like, 80 students there cheering us on." Months later, however, House Bill 5186 is all but dead, lodged in a committee where it has received no hearing. State Representative Alice Wolf , the Cambridge lawmaker who sponsored it, says the legislation will probably have to be re filed and reintroduced next year. But even then, Wolf says, the Cambridge teenagers may be in for one of the toughest civic lessons of all: losing. "I don't know whether there is any will -- or whether there will be any will -- that this should pass," Wolf says. "Aside from whether people think that 17-year-olds should have the right to vote, the idea is election law should be uniform across the state. So you have to overcome that." Cambridge teens have been trying to change the voting age for years. In June 2001, they lobbied city councilors to lower the voting age to 16, but the councilors voted, 5 to 4, against it. The following year they returned with a compromise, asking the city to lower the voting age to 17, and this time the teens prevailed. But state lawmakers never approved the change -- something that got members of the youth involvement subcommittee talking last fall. Nathalie de Marrais , now 18 and a freshman at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, says the group decided it was time to take up the issue again. "Everybody just decided unanimously that this was something really important to concentrate on," says de Marrais. "Seventeen-year-olds, a lot of what goes on in local government affects them. But they don't have anything to do with it." Lowering the voting age would engage teenagers in the political processearlier in life, the students have argued, and get them into the habit of voting before many of them head off to college, where, distracted and in some casesfar from home, it becomesharder to vote.
This might help explain low voter turnout among young voters. In 2004, for example, 53 percent of 18year-olds in the country were not registered and 61 percent did not vote, numbers that get only slightly better among voters in their 20s. But not everyone is convinced that giving 17-year-olds the franchise will improve voter turnout or anything else about the political system. "I had a lot of help from younger kids on my campaign," says Craig Kelley , who was elected to the Cambridge City Council in 2005 and last June was the sole councilor to vote against the measure to lower the voting age. "They were fantastic. Who knows if I would have won without them?" But Kelley says he just isn't comfortable allowing 17-year-olds to vote. He suggests they get involved in other ways: campaign for candidates, put up election signs, rally, or even donate money. The right to vote, he says, will come soon enough. Everyone ultimately gets a say. De Marrais, who turned 18 this month, got hers last Tuesday when she voted for the first time, casting her ballot for Deval Patrick among other candidates. Paul, however, must sit and wait until he turns 18 next August before he finally earns the same right. But the Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School senior and son of Haitian immigrants already knows how to play politics -- at least a little . When applying to colleges this winter, Paul plans to make sure that university admissions officers know that he is involved, that he cares, and that he once argued on behalf of the young and disenfranchised. Paul might not be able to vote. But he's savvy and -- like almost everyone -- he is running for something. "I thought it would be good for college to say I did this."