The Brief

Californians can’t cast a ballot until they turn 18, but for the past decade 16- and 17-year-olds have been able to pre-register to vote and be automatically added to the rolls on their 18th birthday.

“Teens get to get a head start on the access to voting,” said Daphné Rottenberg, a 17-year-old Venice High School student who pre-registered last year. “I think that it's a very important thing for younger people to learn about their rights, their voting rights and ultimately their ability to decide what policies and politicians become their leaders.”

Nearly 1.5 million students have pre-registered since the program started in 2016 and more than 1.1 million became eligible voters, according to a spokesperson for the California Secretary of State.

However, LAist reviewed state data and found that participation in the program cratered during the COVID-19 pandemic and has yet to recover. A nonprofit that promotes youth voting found California’s pre-registration totals represent less than 12% of eligible 16- and 17-year-olds.

“California is not doing a good job implementing pre-registration,” said Laura Brill, who lives in Los Angeles and is the founder and CEO of The Civics Center. “It's a very nice law that lets you do it, but it has not been widely adopted by high schools.”

The unrealized promise of the program is to jumpstart the civic lives of young voters, who’ve been historically underrepresented at the polls.

“The process of signing up creates conversations, dialogue that can educate young people and hopefully encourage them [to vote],” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at USC. “If they vote at 18, they're much more likely to continue to vote through the life course. But you've got to get them when they're young.”

Do young people vote?

Rottenberg, who describes herself as “pretty involved in the political scene,” didn’t know about pre-registration until she connected with The Civics Center through a teacher to hold a voter registration drive at her school.

Young people vote, but at lower rates than older voters. In the 2024 presidential election, 43% of Californians 18-24 cast a ballot compared to 62% of overall turnout. Romero said this deficit has been consistent over time.

“Every youth vote is valuable and important, but the numbers should be higher,” Romero said. “It's really on our society and we shouldn't be blaming young people for that.”

For example, Romero said campaigns typically don’t prioritize youth outreach and engagement, which feeds into the narrative that candidates don’t represent young people’s interests.

“I think young people really struggle with particularly coming of age in this polarized environment,” Romero said. “They feel really disconnected from the political process. They care about the world and issues, but they don't see necessarily how voting is an actionable step on what they care about.”

Another factor is the decline of civics education at many schools.

“We somewhere along the line disconnected the notion of high schools and K through 12 schools as like, bedrocks of teaching democracy and democratic practice,” said Joel Snyder, a social studies teacher at a charter school in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood. “I think a lot of that nationally is a real fear of folks looking or feeling like they're being partisan.”

Even Snyder, who's been a teacher for more than two decades, paused during our interview to consider whether to share that as part of his class, students register to vote.

When did pre-registration start?

California is one of 19 states that allow teenagers to pre-register to vote at 16 or younger. The majority of states allow people to register if they will be 18 at the time of the election.

California 16-year-olds became eligible for pre-registration in fall 2016.

Then-Santa Barbara Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson cited the state’s low voter registration rates to promote the legislation that lowered the pre-registration age.

“Studies have shown that the earlier people are introduced to voting, the more likely they are to become life-long participants in democracy,” Jackson wrote.

Research shows that pre-registration is associated with higher youth voter turnout.

Here’s how pre-registration works in California:

Eligible 16- and 17-year-olds must be:

• A U.S. Citizen and California resident 
• Not currently serving a state and federal prison term for a felony conviction or found mentally incompetent to vote by a court

Then, eligible teens can register

• Online— this option requires a California-issued driver’s license or identification card number. 
• By mailing or turning in a paper registration form to your county elections office— this option does not require a California-issued driver’s license or identification card number  

In April 2018, then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla said the pre-registration of 100,000 teenagers was a “big milestone.”

The number of pre-registered teens peaked in January 2020 at 163,000 — then fell to a record low, about 113,000, in February 2021.

About 119,000 California 16- and 17-year-olds are pre-registered to vote as of April 3, per the most recent report from the California Secretary of State.

Romero hasn’t analyzed the program’s outcomes, but offered a “likely” set of factors contributing to the stagnating participation.

One is a lack of funding for outreach and education around pre-registration.

“You can't just offer it and then expect a high sign-up rate,” Romero said. “There needs to be conversations around why it's important, what the nuts and bolts of registration are, what the nuts and bolts are of voting so kids feel confident.”

Governor Gavin Newsom has twice vetoed legislation that would have required high schools to help register students to vote.

In the veto letter for AB 2724, a 2024 bill that would have required schools to provide students information about pre-registration before the end of their junior year, Newsom wrote he was concerned about creating another school mandate.

“Schools already have the ability to fulfill the requirements of this bill without creating a new mandate,” Newsom said.

The last two weeks of April and September each year are designated as “high school voter education weeks,” in California, but the responsibility is on individual districts, schools and teachers to follow through.

“Civics in schools is under-taught, right, and under-resourced, and teachers are burdened, they have lots of different competing requirements,” Romero said. “So you have to be really committed to wanna talk to young people about this.”

Brill, with The Civics Center, said there are other changes that could help make it easier for teens to pre-register, including removing the requirement to have a driver’s license to sign up online. About a third of teenagers nationwide have their driver’s license.

Her organization holds trainings and created a toolkit for students and educators to host voter registration drives at their schools. Brill said more than 100 are planned for this spring, including at Venice High School.

“It really bothers me when people think that they're not being heard and so they completely disengage,” said Sage Smith, who is organizing the drive with several other students, including Rottenberg. “Instead of tuning everything out, I, we are able to bring people in so that they actually get involved.”

Smith said more than 300 of her peers pre-registered to vote during last year’s drive, which targeted seniors.

“There's an idea that, you know, younger people are uninvolved, but when they're presented with the information, everyone cared, everyone was quick to sign up,” Smith said.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk. (The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized).

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.