California lets teens pre-register to vote before they’re 18. It doesn’t teach them how

Americans recently marked the nation’s semiquincentennial — 250 years since a band of revolutionaries staked everything on the idea that a people could govern themselves. 

Anniversaries invite us to look backward. But the survival of that experiment, our democracy, has always depended on something no patriotic parade can supply: citizens prepared to take part in it.

By that measure, the next 250 years are off to a troubling start. The Sacramento Bee recently reported that 57% of California’s 18-year-olds are not registered to vote, a gap driven in large part by a lack of civic education. 

California allows 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register so that their registration activates automatically on their 18th birthday. Only 11% of eligible teenagers have done so. 

Apathy is a convenient explanation — and usually the wrong one. Kylie Barker, a young voter from Merced, turned 18 in 2020 and missed her first election for a reason she later described plainly: She wanted to vote but nobody had ever shown her how. 

This is a solvable problem, and the Legislature has already written the solution — twice. What Sacramento owes us now is a third act: a real floor vote and a governor’s signature.

In 2024, then-Assemblymember Eloise Gómez Reyes authored a modest measure requiring schools to ensure every student receives information on how to pre-register to vote before the end of 11th grade. To deliver it, districts could partner with nonprofit organizations specializing in nonpartisan youth civic engagement.

The bill passed both chambers, but Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it, writing that schools already have the ability to fulfill the bill’s requirements without a new mandate.

That reasoning gets the ledger backwards. Schools have had that ability for years — but an 11% pre-registration rate is what a voluntary approach creates. 

Yes, mandates carry costs. But weigh the price of sharing registration information with 11th graders against the price of raising a generation that never learns to vote. One belongs on a budget line; the other belongs in democracy’s obituary.

Reyes, now a state senator, refused to give up. She reintroduced the measure last year as Senate Bill 316, the High School Voter Registration Act. It cleared the Senate, passed the Assembly’s Education Committee unanimously and its Elections Committee.

Then it died quietly in the Assembly Appropriations Committee’s suspense file, where good bills disappear without a vote or an explanation.

The timing of this failure could hardly be worse. American democracy is under strain from forces its founders would recognize and fear: Roughly 1 in 3 Americans support authoritarianism through a strongman or military rule, and 1 in 5 believe it is permissible to use violence to achieve political objectives. 

Meanwhile, at least nine states and the Trump administration have spent recent years erecting new barriers to the ballot. 

Voting alone will not cure what ails our democracy. But a citizenry that knows how to register, how to vote and why it matters is the strongest, most basic system of immunity a republic has.

California already accepts this premise. State law requires every high school student to complete a semester of American government and civics to graduate. We teach students how a bill becomes a law. SB 316 simply asked us to teach them how a citizen becomes a voter. 

The founders gave us a republic, “if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin reportedly warned. Keeping it is taught, generation by generation. Or it is lost.

If we want America’s 250th birthday to be a milestone rather than a memorial, the Legislature should revive SB 316, pass it and send it to the governor. This time, he should sign it.