Council to consider lowering voting age to 16

By SHARON O’MALLEY

The College Park City Council in July directed its staff to come up with a proposal to allow 16- and 17-year-old residents to vote in city elections.

At the same meeting on July 9, councilmembers declined to continue a decade-old effort to lengthen their terms from two years to four.

In a non-binding advisory question on the November 2023 ballot, College Park residents favored four-year staggered terms for the mayor and councilmembers.

“This is something that we’ve been discussing for the better part of 10 years,” Councilmember John Rigg (District 3), said at the meeting. “We are one of the few municipalities of any size that has two-year terms.”

Rigg said councilmembers “are substantially less productive every other year when we have an election because we have to make time in our otherwise busy part-time [council] jobs to also run for re-election while trying to govern the city.”

He conceded that switching to staggered four-year terms would not save city staff any time because elections would still be held every two years, but with fewer candidates.

Plus, Rigg said, figuring out how to stagger terms in an equitable way “is a messy one” because during the first election of the new system, some candidates would be assigned four-year terms, while others would run for only two years.

Voters also weighed in on the issue in 2019, when they responded to an advisory ballot question by saying they favored two-year terms.

In a straw poll during the meeting, six councilmembers said they did not want staff to bring a proposal to the council for more discussion and a possible vote, while two, including Rigg and Councilmember Alan Hew (District 1), endorsed a second work session on the issue.

In a second straw poll, councilmembers decided 5-3 to schedule a future discussion that could lead to allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to register to vote in city elections.

Rigg said he supports registering teenagers to vote, noting the younger they start participating in elections, the more likely they will regularly vote as adults.

Past University of Maryland student liaisons to the council “were constantly fretting over how they just had problems getting, especially freshmen and sophomores … to the polls,” Rigg said. “A lot [of] them just don’t feel compelled to vote at all because it’s not something they’ve ever done. … They went to college before they really had a chance to participate in a meaningful election in a lot of cases.”

Rigg noted that few 16- and 17-year-olds would be likely to vote if the city allowed it, and therefore would be unlikely to sway an election.

“As a matter of mathematics and a matter of political economy, there’s only about 300 residents ages 16 and 17 in the city,” he said, citing U.S. Census Bureau statistics. He estimated that approximately 8% of College Park residents vote. “If you assume that we got 8% of that 300, what we’re really talking about are, like, a couple dozen voters.”

Rigg added, “I’ve only heard upside on this. … We will hear opposition from some residents who are just leery of any kind of change and/or who are naturally suspicious of younger people.” 

Still, he added, expanding the voting age “strikes me as a pretty good idea with very little downside.”

Councilmember Maria Mackie (District 4), said she polled her five adult children, who said they would not have been ready to vote at age 16.

“They all said no, we wouldn’t want to vote when we were 16 or 17. [They] didn’t feel that they had the education and the ability to make the best decision” at 16, Mackie said, noting she would rather develop a youth advisory council “to get them involved but not necessarily give them a right to vote.”

While the voting age in most of Maryland is 18, state law allows local city councils to lower it in their municipalities. Five cities, including Greenbelt, Hyattsville, Mount Rainier, Riverdale Park and Takoma Park, allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections. Seventeen-year-olds may vote in all Maryland primaries, as long as they will turn 18 before the general election. 

According to Vote16USA, a national group that advocates for a lower voting age for local elections, teenagers in those five Maryland cities turn out on Election Day in greater numbers than older voters.