New Resource: Voter Registration in High Schools by State
Find the law in your state and help schools comply. Read our opinionated guide to state requirements for high school voter registration.
In 2020 we at The Civics Center surveyed college students on topics relating to voter registration.
We wanted to know: Did their high school help them register to vote? By a 4:3 margin, they said no.
We wanted to know if they could provide the correct answer when asked, at what age young people were allowed to register or preregister to vote in their state. The majority answered incorrectly.
The two things are related. Most high schools are not teaching young people about voter registration. As a result, they reach voting age without knowing the laws, without knowing the significance of voter registration in our system, and in most cases without registering to vote.
Based on our independent research, the average registration rate for 18-year-olds in midterms is under 30%, meaning that more than 2.5 million are blocked out. Counting all 18- to 24-year-olds, it’s more than 10 million young people on track not to have a voice in the midterms this November.
If you’ve been following The Civics Center for a while, you know I’m a lawyer, a mom, and a former law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In 2018, I started The Civics Center to make voter registration part of every high school in America. My wake-up moment was reading through the California Election Code (not kidding) and realizing that we allow young people to preregister to vote starting at age 16, something I had not known, and also that we require high schools to identify a person responsible for distributing voter registration forms, but that hardly any schools were complying.
The more I investigated, the more I saw how scarce the resources were for addressing this challenge. Most leaders and staff at schools and school districts had never heard of preregistration or other laws about making voter registration part of high school life. There was no funding for implementing them, and no one on a state level was actively seeking to achieve compliance.
It’s not that the ideas animating preregistration and high school voter registration statutes are not sound. In fact, our research demonstrated that those districts that were taking it upon themselves to put the basics into place were achieving better results in registration rates than those that were not. The problem is that so few people knew about the laws or had resources to put them to optimal use. Instead of a robust system of high school voter registration, what we most often saw was that the question whether a community did or did not have high voter registration rates for its 18-year-olds boiled down to whether a great guidance counselor or US government teacher at this school or that, had taken it upon themselves to get the job done. It’s not a winning recipe for ensuring that every voice will count. It’s not a great path to building trust in democracy and elections. Fundamentally, it’s not fair to young people — our future.
In 2018, As one of my first research projects for the field, I decided to find the age at which young people can register or preregister in all 50 states. The few resources that existed at the time were either outdated, filled with errors, or confusing. For example, many lumped all laws together that allow a student to register if they will be 18 by the next “election,” and did not distinguish between laws based on which election (federal or state, general, primary, or special) they were talking about.
Others seemed to categorize all states with laws referencing “preregistration” together, although some states allow preregistration at age 16 (or even age 15 now, in Colorado). Others, like Texas, use the word preregistration, but do not allow teens to submit a voter registration form until they turn 17 years and 10 months.
Distinctions like these are critical to the audience that matters most: teenagers who want to register to vote and who are wondering if they are old enough.
The resource we created at that time, a state-by-state list and map cataloguing state pre-18 registration rules, continues to be one of our most important resources and helps students, parents, and school communities understand how to marry the school calendar with the laws in their states. It’s the high-school-focused starting point for how to implement effective pre-18 voter registration programs.
In Texas for example, high school drives are most effective in the spring, since that is when the greatest number of young people will be eligible. Drives in the fall can also be effective in capturing back-to-school and election energy, and raising awareness. Fewer students will be able to complete the process at that time, but these efforts will still have an impact on those who can register, and their effects can lead to greater impact the following spring. The understanding of how registration laws interact with the school calendar is critical to setting appropriate expectations and investing in the right program for the right time based on state differences.
But age-based registration laws are not the only laws impacting whether high school students will register. Equally important are laws dictating what high schools are required to do to promote voter registration. Once school communities know what is required, they can focus on improving adherence to the laws that exist today, as well as expanding legislative, regulatory, and programmatic efforts to fill the gaps.
I’m therefore delighted to announce The Civics Center’s new resource:
Our 2026 guide covering state-level statutory requirements governing high school voter registration:
We believe it is a first of its kind, focusing strictly on statutory requirements concerning high school voter registration, and offering the details needed to crystalize patterns and variations, promote compliance, and build toward a model code and best practices.¹
If you are in the TL;DR camp, here are the highlights of our findings for the different categories of state requirements for high school voter registration.
As I was researching the codes, I got curious about what historical figures have said about the importance of making laws understandable and useful to the communities that work with them. With a single search query, I found that Malcolm X, John Adams, and Sandra Day O’Connor were all of one mind on the topic. See for yourself:
“If you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.” — Malcolm X
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … and a desire to know.” — John Adams
“Commitment to the rule of law provides a basic assurance that people can know what to expect whether what they do is popular or unpopular at the time.” — Sandra Day O’Connor
Like the laws themselves, these explanations for the importance of disseminating legal knowledge come in a variety of flavors. But their agreement has at its heart support for the rule of law in a democracy, and the need for all of us to understand how laws impact us. And if these three thinkers can all fundamentally agree that the effort to share legal knowledge is important, perhaps it’s worth doing, and perhaps their agreement can give us hope. Hope for democracy, hope for creating shared commitments despite many differences, and hope that young people will be a full part of the equation.
I hope you find these resources useful. I hope you will cite them and share this post with your networks. I hope you will help inform high schools in your community about their obligations and encourage them to get free training from The Civics Center or our partner organizations so they can incorporate voter registration into their activities this spring. I hope that if you find additional provisions we have not found you will let me know so we can add them to the list.
The author gratefully acknowledges the outstanding research assistance of Max Kessler (NYU Law, J.D. class of 2027).
1 For a recent scan of state policies that encourage or facilitate a range of activities related to electoral engagement and education please see CIRCLE’s 2023 Growing Voters policy update. For a college-focused history, see Youth Voting Rights: Civil Rights, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and the Fight for American Democracy on College Campuses (2025, Jonathan Becker & Yael Bromberg, eds.).