Pajaro Valley Unified School District board to explore lowering voting age for board elections to age 16

Will Pajaro Valley Unified School District community members join the movement to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in board elections?

It’s now an idea in early discussion as three trustees from the PVUSD governing board want to know if the community is interested in lowering the voting age. If it moves forward, the change would follow in the footsteps of several San Francisco Bay Area cities and others nationwide. 

“When I was doing research for my campaign platform and talking to students, one of the things that they felt is that they didn’t really have a voice in the schools, and that a lot of adults were making decisions that really impacted them,” said Trustee Gabe Medina. “I started doing research to see how we could get them more involved.” Medina first proposed the idea for lowering the voting age while he campaigned for his seat in November 2024. 

Along with Trustees Carol Turley and Jessica Carrasco, who have formed a subcommittee, the trio says it will begin planning this week to schedule discussions. The PVUSD board created the ad hoc committee last month to gather input from the district community and to research the legal and policy implications of lowering the voting age.

Lookout spoke to district officials, a national advocate and one student leader to learn about the initiative. 

Watsonville High School senior Desiderio Salinas-Holz, 17, said he’s in support of lowering the voting age because the decisions the board makes impact all students, and they’re mature enough. 

“We are the ones who go to school and the decisions affect us,” he said. “If you can drive a car at 16, then you should be able to vote for who’s making decisions about your school.”

Salinas-Holz is also the new student trustee for the 2025-26 year and will attend all the board meetings alongside the regular trustees. His first meeting was Wednesday. 

Berkeley and Oakland voters approved lowering the voting age to 16 in 2016 and 2020, respectively, through Measures Y1 and QQ, but it took Alameda County officials years to work through the technicalities. The measures changed the city charters, which had previously set the voting age to 18. 

Despite the success of the measures years ago, it wasn’t until last year that the cities announced that 16- and 17-year-olds could finally vote in school board elections last November. Alameda County officials said the process of issuing ballots to a select group of voters was challenging and caused the delays. By Election Day last year, about 1,500 students ages 16 and 17 had registered to vote in both cities but just 575 cast ballots, according to KQED. 

Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber told Lookout if a charter amendment were to be successfully adopted, it would take her anywhere from six months to one year to figure out how to administer an election for PVUSD’s 16- and 17-year-olds. She wasn’t aware if any other local school districts had explored this. 

“Being involved in the process, whether you can vote or not, is more likely to make you – once you are eligible to register – continue within the process,” Webber said. “I definitely agree that we should be encouraging people of all ages, including the youth, to be involved in their community.”

While PVUSD doesn’t track its students by age, during the 2024-25 academic year, the district had 1,165 10th graders (ages 15 and 16) and 1,065 11th graders (ages 16 and 17). 

The district had 1,118 12th graders, or students ages 17 and 18. The total for the three grade levels was 3,348. 

If all those students registered, the total number of registered voters in the district would be 57,898 – making the students about 5.78% of the voters. 

The national movement

LaJuan Allen, executive director of Vote16USA, a national campaign advocating for lowering the voting age, said not only are 16- and 17-year-olds mature enough to vote, they’re often the ones leading political movements. 

“We think about the most pressing issues in our society — climate, gun legislation, education — and it’s young people who are at the forefront of these movements, meeting with adults to get it right,” he said. 

Vote16USA is a campaign organized by Generation Citizen, a New York-based nonprofit promoting civics education and engagement for youth. Allen said 14 cities in the country have lowered the voting age, and dozens more are in different stages of exploring it or are in the process of changing city laws. Of the 14 cities that have lowered it, three are in California, nine are in Maryland and one each in New Jersey and Vermont. 

During a Vote16USA national convention hosted at UCLA earlier this month, Allen said attendees talked about organizing around legislation that would lower the voting age to 16- and 17-year-olds across the state. 

“We’ve had a variety of different campaigns happen in various cities, but there has not yet been a statewide effort,” he said. “There is a desire in the state, and something that we’re working on with our partners in California, to be able to move with advocating for statewide legislation.” 

The legislation would allow cities that want to change to have the right to lower the voting age without state approval, or the legislation would lower the age for only school board elections or for all municipal and statewide elections.  

In California, a city charter lays out the government’s powers and rules describing operations such as how laws are made and how the city council is elected. City charters also include regulations on voting, including the voting age. Berkeley and Oakland have charters and changed them through passing measures. Watsonville also has a charter that has a minimum voting age of 18. 

If a city doesn’t have a charter, meaning it’s what’s called a general law city, it’s governed by the general laws of the state. Cities without a charter in California would have to seek a change at the state level in order to lower the voting age. 

Allen said he hasn’t talked with PVUSD community members about their effort, but he said he would partner with them. 

“Voting is habitual,” he said. “You’re much more likely to vote for a lifetime the earlier you are able to vote. Sixteen is a much better age to establish voting as a habit.”

PVUSD spokesperson Alicia Jimenez acknowledged that while some city governments have made charter amendments, she said that “any binding change to the voting age must be made at the state level.” She said charter amendments have faced legal challenges. 

“To lower the voting age, the process would require a state constitutional amendment, which can only be placed on the ballot through action by the state legislature or through a citizen initiative,” she wrote via email. “Once on the ballot, it would need to be approved by a majority of voters statewide.”

She added that the district’s board of trustees could consider adopting a resolution “in support of such a proposal,” but reiterated that the district can’t make the change independently. 

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