A growing number of U.S. municipalities are making it possible for minors to vote.
Thousands of high school students in Oakland, California, will be voting for the first time this November after a successful ballot measure gave 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in local school board elections.
Ashley Tchanyoum, a high school junior in Oakland, says she has been encouraging her classmates to register in the lead-up to the election and looks forward to exercising her right to vote for the first time. “It empowers students to have a voice in shaping the policies that affect them every day,” she says.
The Oakland initiative is part of a growing movement in the United States to lower the voting age to enfranchise 16- and…