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Geoff West

Geoff West is a staff writer at The Fulcrum, where he covers voting and voting rights, civic education, civil discourse and disinformation. Email:geoffwest@thefulcrum.us

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    Voting

    Strong arguments aside, movement to allow teens to vote appears to stall

    Geoff West
    March 09, 2021
    Lower the voting age

    California teens have been fighting to lower the voting for years.

    commons.wikimedia.org

    When the mayor of Takoma Park, Md., hired a 17-year-old campaign manager and ran ads in the local high school newspaper in 2015, the highly unusual campaign moves seemed to make solid political sense. After all, nearly half of the Washington suburb's teenagers had turned out in 2013, when it became the nation's first municipality to award the franchise to people younger than 18 — and overall turnout hovered at a dismal 10 percent.

    But the success of this experiment in civic engagement has not heralded a transformation in the nation's voter qualification rules. Only half a dozen other places have followed Takoma Park's lead. Proposals in several other liberal bastions have come up short — and last week the House resoundingly rejected, for the second time in three years, allowing 16-year-olds to vote in federal elections.

    Many educators and progressive politicians remain undeterred. In a time of embarrassingly bad civic literacy and with turnout in most recent elections well below most developed countries, they say lowering the voting age would be a great way to breed lifelong voting habits in high schoolers while making their civic education immediately relevant outside of the classroom.

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    young voters

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    Big Picture

    Group helps channel millions for democracy reform efforts

    Geoff West
    March 13, 2020
    Wall Street

    Leadership Now has helped drive funding from business leaders to organizations like the Center for Responsive Politics, the Voter Participation Center and BridgeUSA.

    Simon Carter Peter Crowther/Getty Images

    Business leaders have committed nearly $6 million in funding for political reform groups since last year, through the help of an organization that engages the business community on the structural threats to democracy.

    The funding was committed by members of the Leadership Now Project, an organization comprised largely of business leaders that helps channel strategic investment in the political reform space.

    Last year, Leadership Now began analyzing the policies and practices of nearly 200 political reform groups to provide the business community and potential donors with a sense of which organizations offered a particularly high return on investment for democracy.

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    civic engagement
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