Council Rejects Proposal to Allow Lower Voting Age

The Berkeley City Council narrowly voted against a proposal Tuesday that would have allowed voters to decide if 16 and 17-year-olds should be eligible to vote in local elections if the state were to permit it.

The initiative, which fell one vote shy of approval, would have amended the city charter to give voters the authority to decide whether to lower the voting age to 16 for city elections if it became legal in the state.

A second part of the proposal supported state legislation for a measure that would allow individual cities and counties to lower the voting age in local elections.

Robert Reynolds, president of the Berkeley chapter of the National Youth Rights Association, who helped present the proposal to the council, said he was surprised at the outcome.

"It was sort of ironic that the council members who voted against (the proposal) used their democratic right to vote to deny someone else that same right," Reynolds said.

Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who co-sponsored the proposal, said that people may have misunderstood the aim of the initiative, assuming that the proposal would lower the voting age in Berkeley immediately rather than opening the option to public vote.

"New ideas usually take some education before they get accomplished, so it's not surprising that the first time it's voted on it was not unanimously approved," Worthington said.

Several council members who opposed the measure said 16 and 17- year-olds would not be able to vote intelligently enough.

"There's enough idiots voting already," said Councilmember Betty Olds.

Olds added that while she thought the Berkeley High School students who presented at the council meeting should be able to vote, other youth she had talked to did not express an interest.

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli said he could not support the measure partly because of "my own memory of myself as a 16-year-old."

Despite Tuesday's defeat, the members of the association said they planned to pursue the proposal further by appealing at the next City Council meeting and widen the scope of the measure by looking for sponsorship within the Oakland City Council.

Josh Keller of the Daily Californian contributed to this report.

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