Above is a towering photo of Los Angeles City Hall. It is the focal point for SoCal’s efforts to push for lowering the voting age. However, L.A. isn’t the only SoCal city to see some “lower-the-voting-age” action, as you’ll read shortly.
If you tuned in to last month’s post, you might have noticed that it was more focused on northern California, so this month, we’ll focus on more southern Golden State action.
If you’ve also been following the action around Los Angeles Charter reform, you might also be aware of the efforts to lower the voting age to 16. Last month, the Commission behind the reforms decided to do just that by voting to recommend adding it to the city charter for City Council to take up in the next few weeks, with the possibility of it becoming a ballot measure to be voted on by L.A.’s residents at this year’s November election.
Although L.A.’s progress at the time of this writing isn’t yet set in stone(there’s a meeting tomorrow on St. Patrick’s of all days to draft charter language), there’s a good chance that it will likely end up on the Los Angeles ballot later this year, alongside the mayoral race happening this year.
While there’s a quite a bit of action going on in Tinsletown, there’s actually more going on a bit to the west in Culver City.
Culver City has also pushed to get lowering the voting age on their local ballot after a previous attempt to get the motion passed in 2022. The irony of that was that not only was only a few votes short of passage, but it only failed by 16 votes. This time, the Culver City Vote16 group is ready for another try later this year.
Something worth noting is that at one of the City Council meetings a few weeks ago, one of the City Councilmembers alluded to the efforts going next door through L.A.’s charter reform by speaking about the importance of the work the local team is doing.
The work continues to spread around lowering the voting age to 16. More updates next month.
Jester Jersey
Admin of the 16ToVoteProject & Vote16CAL accounts
#16ToVoteAdvocacyProject 