By admin 
Recent high school graduate Melenny Andrade said she didn’t know anything about voting as a sophomore.
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“I had no clue what civic engagement really was at the time,” she told The Sacramento Bee.
But then she began leading enrollment drives with SAY Vote, a group in Santa Ana that trains high schoolers to help their fellow students register or pre-register to vote.
It was easier to recruit her peers, said Andrade, because she was also a student. Her focus was “just trying to be as straightforward as possible, while also telling them the benefits of it, for us and for the community,” she said. “Overall, just reminding them that their voice matters.”
High schools are the best places to reach a wide swath of eligible voters, according to Laura Brill, the founder and CEO of a national nonprofit focused on registering voters while they’re still in school.
“This is where you can reach everybody, as opposed to just the college kids, or just drivers,” Brill said, referencing other sites where young people get opportunities to sign up. “It’s one of the perfect places, because you’ve got this on-ramp. Everybody starts out unregistered, and you’ve gotta bring them in.”
In California, while around 517,000 18-year-olds are eligible to vote every year, about 43% are registered to do so, according to data from Brill’s organization, The Civics Center.
That’s higher than much of the United States. Across the country, around 4 million Americans turn 18 every year. The Civics Center’s research found that, across 30 states, about 40 percent of those teens are registered.
But California advocates say there’s still room to improve, and that the state hasn’t done enough to address the structural challenges that keep students from the voter rolls.
One of the most effective ways to reach young people, Brill said, is pre-registration. The policy allows 16-year-olds in the state to sign up, either online or using a paper application, for automatic enrollment when they turn 18.
But high school students don’t always know about the options available.
“On the civic side, we have still a pretty abysmal civics education in the U.S.,” said Mindy Romero, the director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at U.S.C.’s public policy school.
“Young people really aren’t taught how to vote and why it’s important, and to really feel like it matters,” Romero said.
Increasing access through legislation
Since 2024, lawmakers have twice sought to address that lack of education. Now-state Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes introduced a bill, back when she was an assemblymember, that would have required school boards to provide high school juniors with information about how to preregister properly.
The proposed legislation made it all the way to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. But he vetoed the bill, citing concerns about creating a new mandate for schools. Such a mandate would have required the state to reimburse local agencies for the cost of implementing the program.
Reyes said young people inspired her to pursue the legislation.
“A group of passionate high school students from my district brought me this idea because they believed their peers deserved a better understanding of how to participate in our democracy,” she told the Bee in an email. “They weren’t asking for a partisan lesson. They were asking us to make sure every student knows they have a voice.”
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Reyes tried again last year, submitting the same bill to the California Senate. This time, it died in committee.
“Even though the bill didn’t make it across the finish line, I have never stopped believing in what they were fighting for,” Reyes said. “High school is our last opportunity to reach nearly every future voter before adulthood. If we want to build a lifetime of civic participation, we should make it as easy as possible for young people to take that first step by learning about California’s pre-registration process.”
In an emailed statement, the governor’s office said Newsom is committed to expanding voter participation among eligible Californians.
“California is proud to be a top 15 state when it comes to youth voter participation,” a spokesperson said.
That statistic is reflected in The Civics Center’s data. California beats out most of the country, but is outperformed by several other western states, including Oregon, Colorado and Nevada.
Urban and suburban Northern Californian counties like Marin, Placer and Contra Costa have some of the highest rates, with 57%, 56% and 52% registered, respectively. In Sacramento County, 50% of the county’s 18,591 18-year-olds are registered, the data shows.
The governor’s office also pointed to statutes that support voter education in schools, including a policy allowing for voluntary instruction and a requirement that the secretary of state provide high schools with voter registration forms and notices detailing eligibility requirements.
The power of youth organizing
Young organizers like Melenny Andrade are vital to help fill an education gap, and get high schoolers signed up, researchers say.
“What we’ve seen on the outreach mobilization side, peer-to-peer is the most powerful,” said the Center for Inclusive Democracy’s Romero. “A young person that’s similarly situated, with a similar background, talking to their peers, their friends at home and at school, making the case for voting, talking about issues that matter, connecting it to the political and civic infrastructure, that’s the best tool.”
At her school in Santa Ana, Andrade did just that.
More than 100 students pre-registered to vote in her first registration drive, she said. And as a senior, she signed up over 90 of her peers.
It brought in students who weren’t always interested in voting, she said.
“By the time they’re 18 or trying to vote, they probably think, ‘oh, you know what? I actually do want to vote.’ So thankfully, they’re already pre-registered,” Andrade said.
Andrade said she’s bringing the lessons she’s learned to Cal State Fullerton, where she’ll study nursing in the fall.
“Civic engagement is overall just important in anyone’s lives, regardless of what it is that you’re majoring in,” she said. “That’s why I kind of felt like, you know, why not just be a little bit more involved in my community?”
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