California: 300,000 teens need our help right now to get ready to vote in November

Written By Laura Brill

If our leaders won’t step up, it’s on the rest of us to get missing voters registered.

I live in California, and I’ve been wanting updated numbers about voter registration for the youngest voters for quite some time. Now we’ve got them, and I’d be sugar-coating it if I said they were anything other than disappointing.

The latest report from The Civics Center, is now out with our data showing that just 43% of California’s 18-year-olds are registered to vote ahead of November’s midterm elections, compared to 76% of Californians ages 45 and above. If all the state’s 18-year-olds were registered, we’d be adding nearly 300,000 to the voter rolls.

The state offers preregistration for 16-year-olds, online registration, automatic registration at the DMV, and mail-in voting as a default. Yet California’s registration rate for 18-year-olds lags far behind the rates in many states we’re tracking. At the high end we have Oregon, Michigan, Colorado - all with rates at 70% or above. Also out-performing California are Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Florida, each of which, like California, allow preregistration starting at age 16.

One potentially hopeful note: registration rates vary significantly within the state, with northern California counties outpacing those in the south, which suggests the problem is fixable.

As part of our work tracking voting participation rates for 18-year-olds compared to the over-45s, we created a visualization portal showing rates in 30 states and their counties, and we’ve just added California.

We found that:

  • Just 43% of California’s 18-year-olds are registered to vote, compared to 76 percent of those over 45 — a gap of more than 30 percentage points.

  • Nearly 300,000 of California’s youngest eligible voters are absent from the state’s voter rolls.

  • Many other western states substantially outperform California, including Oregon (86%), Colorado (70%), and Nevada (65%). And so do many states with diverse populations, like Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Florida.

  • Regional variation within California is significant. Among Southern California’s 10 counties (Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Kern, Venturi, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Imperial), three counties (San Diego, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo) are below 40%, and only Ventura County reaches a registration rate above 50%. In Northern California, none of the Bay Area counties falls below 40%, and Marin, Contra Costa, and Alameda are all at 50% or above.

  • Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States, has 43 percent of its 18-year-olds registered, leaving more than 70,000 young Angelenos unregistered ahead of November’s upcoming mayoral and gubernatorial races.

In California’s 22nd Congressional District, which the Cook Political Report ranks as one of the most competitive in the country in the upcoming midterms, none of the counties with territory in the district (Kern, Tulare, Fresno, Merced, and Kings) have registration rates for 18-year-olds at or above 50%.

California’s uneven performance suggests that implementing policy innovations has not kept pace with the promise of these reforms. Although the state offers preregistration for 16-year-olds, online registration, automatic registration at the DMV, and mail-in voting as a default, efforts to ensure high school voter registration have failed.

The state legislature has twice passed legislation that would require high schools to actively help students register to vote. Both times, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bills. And California’s system for automatic registration at the DMV is so poorly implemented that approximately 100,000 eligible teens opt out each year. Governor Newsom likewise vetoed legislation that would have authorized the Secretary of State to create a “Secure AVR” system to fix the problem.

What’s the Solution?

Many policy and programmatic interventions could make a real difference in our state. California has laws that should make registration easy but they aren’t effectively implemented. Reviving legislation to create an improved Secure AVR system at the DMV and to implement voter registration in high schools would go a long way to increasing voter registration rates for the youngest voters in the state.

Fixes from our officials will take time and resources - but there’s something we can all do, and that’s help California’s teens take action today, and certainly before the midterm registration deadline of October 19. Parents, educators, activists, faith leaders, communities of all kinds should work to help high school students understand the importance of registering to vote, the power and impact of voting, and their own capacity to make a difference by registering to vote themselves and helping their peers to overcome the barriers and do the same. If we do what we can now, we can increase awareness of and pressure for the policy and technological solutions our kids need.

What Can We Do?

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Laura Brill
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