[ Relaxed reggaton beat ] - My biggest priority is being an educated voter.

I wanna make sure that I have all the resources together and I'm able to make like a really methodical decision.

- Its five days before election and Berkeley High School Junior Ali is about to cast her vote for the first time in California.

16 and 17 year olds in the cities of Berkeley and Oakland are voting in the 2024 school board elections.

- And I'm also really excited because it's preparing me for bigger elections and learning like how to fill out a ballot and where to drop it and what to do I feel like is like I'm really excited for that because a lot of other students aren't gonna have that ability.

- I'm just really eager to for youth to really start to see themselves as a potential voting block.

- Lucas Breca Meisner is the director of Oakland Kids First.

He describes the nonprofit as a youth power building organization.

It was deeply involved in the effort to get the youth vote passed and implemented.

- Schools exist because of students and students have so much experiential expertise of being inside these institutions.

They have so much more lived experience in these public systems and yet have historically had no say so.

There's also so many studies that have showed that younger first time voters are more likely to become lifelong voters, but the biggest reason is they want to be able to hold their elected officials accountable.

- It took more than eight years to arrive at this moment.

Berkeley passed a measure allowing youth voting for school boards in 2016.

Oakland passed a similar measure in 2020, but it wasn't until 2024 that the Alameda County registrar voters finalized a system that allowed 16 and 17 year olds to vote with a special ballot that only includes a single race.

Young people advocated for their voices to be heard throughout the long process.

- One of the kind of rallying cries of this whole process has been no decisions about us without us.

- I come from a minority group in Berkeley High School and so our perspectives don't often get, and I wanted to know why.

- High school Senior Zamara is part of a group called youth and government that's involved in the youth vote effort.

She says one of her goals is elevating the voices of students of color.

- There's issues like the achievement gap, which a lot of people aren't necessarily aware of, but we have the second highest achievement gap in the nation.

We've had less diverse teachers in our school and that's an issue that a lot of minority students have come up to me and talked about.

And so advocating for more diverse teachers.

- Another issue that students say they want addressed is school bathrooms.

They say they are often broken down and lack basic products.

- Making sure we're able to have access to those things is really important.

And having students' voices being heard and candidates cater and really listen to students is really important - And the candidates are listening.

Oakland students held a youth candidates forum in the month before the election.

Seven out of eight school board candidates attended answering questions about the district budget, mental health, keeping students safe on campus and other concerns.

- And what happened that night is that I heard directly from students because of the kinds of questions that they asked about what matters most to them.

I don't think it necessarily changed my platform per se, 'cause that was always informed by students.

But I definitely tried harder to make sure that what I put out was something that was accessible to students.

And when students invited me to speak to their organizations or to show up on a panel, I definitely showed up and prioritize that over other things.

- It's been really good to have the candidates kind of listen to students more and more because they know they're getting our votes because they are representing us.

- The role that young people play in these elections is significant, particularly in lower voter turnout districts.

To think that a significant number of young people are gonna be newly enfranchised than those districts and that they are registering at a higher clip than some of the adults I think can have you know, be of great consequence when it comes to these elections.

- By election day of 2024, just under 1500 youth in Oakland and Berkeley were registered to vote.

Ultimately 575 young people cast a vote, although not every district in Oakland was up for a vote that year.

Outside of Oakland and Berkeley, a handful of cities in Maryland, Vermont, and New Jersey allow youth voting.

But the movement is growing.

- Hopefully because of how things will evolve here in Oakland, it'll catch fire and there will be other places across the state and across the country who will pay attention and want the same for their young people.

- And because we're the first municipality to do this and because there is definitely an appetite from a lot of folks nationally, I think this desire to how do we make sure we get this right?

- And I think as we continue to work on advocating for our voices and other cities and other high schools will pick that up and they'll have a smoother time implementing that within their own cities.

- Advocates for lowering the voting age to 16 say it's an effective way to strengthen the nation's democracy.

According to Vote 16 USA giving 16 and 17 year olds the power to vote brings relevance to high school civics classes.

Research also shows that voting in one election can increase the probability that a person will vote in the next election by more than 50%.

And they say teens are impacted by local issues including school funding, policing, job initiatives, and public transit.