Allegedly, America is a country founded on democracy, but not all Americans are given the ability to participate in the democratic process. For instance, in many states, inmates and ex-felons are barred from the voting booths. Motivated to further the long running trend of the enfranchisement of more and more groups of Americans, many organizations…
“We have a saying in this movement that we don’t trust anyone over the age of 30,” said environmental activist Jack Weinberg in 1964 during an interview with a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. This famous quote from the anti-establishment days of the 1960s eventually was memorialized simply as “don’t trust anyone over the…
Next month brings with it another campaign for president, and that means it is time for NYRA to once again look into the issue of campaign contributions from young people. This is an issue NYRA has followed since 2002 when the Shays-Meehan Campaign Finance bill was introduced that ultimately became the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act…
On Tuesday, March 5, the House of Representatives voted on a bill introduced by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) to lower the federal voting age to 16. In this historic vote, 126 representatives voted in favor of the bill, including a majority of House Democrats and Texas Republican Michael Burgess. Pressley’s bill, House Amendment 76 to…
Last November, I had the pleasure of meeting with Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) and her Judicial Counsel in November in her Washington office. Meng introduced a bill to lower the voting age last summer, so I set up a meeting to discuss how we could work together to move the bill forward. I talked about…
I often see people in NYRA’s Facecbook group say they are surprised or disappointed that some political leader or group they like is ageist. There is nothing surprising about it. Everyone is ageist. They aren’t ageist because they are bad people or irrational or hate kids, they just don’t know that there is any other…
Growing up outside of Washington, DC, politics is life. But, as a 15 year old, volunteering isn’t the same as voting. It was the second half of the 1990s and no one had heard of the term “social media”. But we had just discovered the World Wide Web, Geocities had just provided a platform to…
As a ten-year-old kid in Seattle, I was already interested in politics. My friends and I marched around the playground protesting the Iraq War, and I wrote letters to my representatives in the state legislature and Congress on issues I was passionate about. However, I quickly found that many of these elected officials and other…
Former board member (2003-2007) and president, Scott Davidson reflects on his time with NYRA and the people he got to know during his time being active with the organization.
I first got involved with NYRA in 2009, when I was in 8th grade. I had formed a small coalition with some fellow middle schoolers called the Teen Suffrage Organization (TSO) – we hoped to collect signatures for a referendum to lower the voting age in New York State. Online, we learned about NYRA and…
