NORTHAMPTON – In its first meeting of the new school year, the Northampton Youth Commission’s Vote16 working group met to discuss the history of the initiative to lower the voting age in Northampton to 16 and the goals of the group for the 2021-2022 school year.

To start the meeting, Youth Commission Co-Chair, and one of the leaders of the working group, Dahlia Breslow said the goal of the group is to lower the voting age to 16 for all municipal elections in Northampton.

“This group is mainly focused on lowering the voting age to age 16 from 18 only for local municipal election. If lowered, 16- and 17-year-olds could vote for their city councilor, mayor, School Committee and any other ballot initiatives that year,” she said.

By lowering the voting age, Breslow said it will empower the youth of the city and allow them to select their representatives on the Northampton School Committee.

“We think this is a good idea because it will empower youth more, it will make us able to speak our mind the best way this country knows how to with our vote and most importantly to me I think it is crucial we have the opportunity to impact our education by voting for School Committee members,” she said.

After introducing the new group to their goals, Breslow recapped the history of the Vote16 initiative in Northampton, which initially began about four years ago when that group lobbied the Northampton City Council for support.

“What the youth commission started to do initially was they lobbied the City Council to support this initiative, so they went to the City Council and they asked councilors individually with them before they got the City Council to issue a resolution that says the council unanimously supports lowering the voting age to 16 for elections,” she said.

With the resolution in hand, Breslow said the next step was to include the lowered voting age into the city’s charter review in 2020.

“After that we realized the best course of action for actually lowering the voting age was to get it into the charter, which is basically the Constitution for a city. Every 10 years the city goes over the charter and adds amendments which happened in 2020, which means we had the perfect opportunity to include the amendment,” she said.

Once the voting age was adopted as an amendment to the charter, members of the working group testified before the Election Laws Committee in the Massachusetts legislature in June.

“It was sent to the legislature as an individual bill and usually those things take a while to churn through in committee before you get a hearing date but last June, we had a hearing date with the Election Laws Committee. We went as the Vote16 working group and we had speakers come including the City Council, the mayor, and Senator Jo Comerford and Congressman Jim McGovern sent in letters of support,” she said.

After one Tufts professor spoke in favor of lowering the voting age in Northampton at the June hearing, Breslow said his argument made sense because having more people vote is a good thing.

“Northampton would be better off if the voting age were lowered and honestly, I think this is a sensible, non-partisan argument because anyone could see the benefits of increased voter turnout. Having more people voting an out there at the polls is a good thing,” she said.

Breslow added that the legislature has not yet decided on the bill to lower the voting age to 16 in Northampton.

While much of the groundwork to lower the voting age has been established, Breslow said the plan for the working group for this year is to prepare for another hearing with another committee in the legislature.

“This year specifically we are going to prepare for the likely next step which is going to another committee in the legislature and doing a hearing to convince another group of senators and house reps to support Vote16. How we do that and what we did last year is we basically gathered testimony,” she said.

One of the members from the previous year said the previous working group received 750 signatures in support of lowering the voting age to 16 in Northampton.

The Northampton Youth Commission met for its next full meeting on Oct. 6.