Votes for Youth in Takoma Park

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NYRA has long fought for a lower voting age, and we may soon have a breakthrough right on Washington, DC’s border.

Takoma Park, Maryland is now considering a proposal to let 16-year-olds vote in local elections. If this succeeds, we may soon see other cites lose their fear of enfranchising youth. NYRA has already written a letter to the city council in support of this proposal, but there is more work to be done.

On April 8 at 7:30 PM, the Takoma Park city council will hold a public meeting on the issue. NYRA Executive Director Bill Bystricky will speak. There’s room for others to help as well.

What You Can Do

If you live in Takoma Park, show up to the meeting and speak. You’ll get three minutes to make your case, and the city council is eager to hear from all the residents they are expected to represent.

If you live elsewhere, come anyway. Just sitting in the audience and showing your support can help.

The Hearing:

April 8 at 7:30 PM
Takoma Park Community Center
7500 Maple Ave.
Takoma Park, Maryland 20912

2 Comments

We are doing a Twitter Campaign to honor the occasion!
Tweet #Votesforyouth at 4:30pm Eastern April 8th!

https://www.facebook.com/events/441464055937052/

Tomorrow (April 8th) as you know is the hearing in Takoma Park to lower the local voting age to 16. Tomorrow we will launch a voting age campaign. These are the plans for the campaign tomorrow.

People will start switching to the Votes for Youth Profile Picture. The profile picture can be found here ( http://www.youthrights.org/research/downloads/?did=215 ) People who switch to the profile picture should edit the description of their picture to link to the facebook event here ( https://www.facebook.com/events/441464055937052/ ) for the Twitter Storm later

All day people will be casually tweeting, Blogging and Facebooking about the event. Then at 4:30pm Eastern Time we will start the tweet storm. We will try to get #Votesforyouth to trend on twitter and try to spread the word. The tweeting will be a lot like #16toVote except hopefully, more tweets. This should go on for an hour or two. By then we will hopefully have a pastebin of sample tweets that people can use. If not, if you cannot think of enough tweets during the event, just use tweets from the #16toVote Archives and replace #16toVote with #VotesforYouth. In order to get it to trend, It would be ideal to get at least 100 people tweeting one tweet every 5 minutes. Also, twitter does not count retweets for trending.

At 7:30pm Eastern Time is the hearing. The hearing is at

Takoma Park Community Center
7500 Maple Ave.
Takoma Park, Maryland 20912

If you live in the area and you can come, we strongly encourage you to come. People coming to the event should make small (Think Printing Paper Sized) Posters, as well as other things like buttons. Those who are going are strongly encouraged to use the Profile Picture in posters and buttons. Those who can’t come should continue to spread the word online.