Sixteen and seventeen-year-olds in Newark will not be able to vote in the upcoming April school board elections because election officials can’t have systems in place to accommodate the special voter registration in time.
Newark officials were told last week that the Statewide Voter Registration System isn’t built to have partial voter registration.
“We anticipated this would take some time. It was overly ambitious of us to expect this to happen within a few weeks,” said Newark City Clerk Kecia Daniels. “We hope to have it ready for next year.”
A vote by the Newark City Council last month to lower the voting age to sixteen for school elections made national headlines, but that happened before meetings with state and county election officials to work out the details. The deadline to register to vote for the April 16 Board of Education election is March 26.
One day earlier, Gov. Phil Murphy announced in his State of the State address that he supported lowering the voting age to sixteen statewide for Board of Education races.
Technology issues led to a new state law that allows 17-year-olds to vote in primaries if they turned 18 by the general election, which won’t be implemented until 2026 to enable election officials a chance to test and implement the changes to the SVRS.
City Council President LaMonica McIver, who championed the ordinance as empowering young Newark residents, said she was disappointed it won’t be ready for this year but wasn’t shocked.
“This is new. We knew this was a possibility,” McIver said. “I understand there is a process.”
Election officials have told the New Jersey Globe that they remain optimistic that the systems can be in place by next year.
“We don’t want to disappoint these kids,” Daniels said.