If Seneca Valley High School senior Ariella Meltzer lived about 45 minutes west of her Butler County home, the politically astute 17-year-old would have been allowed to cast a ballot for a presidential nominee in Ohio’s primary election March 15.
But, because she lives in Pennsylvania, she won’t be allowed to vote in her state’s spring primary on April 26 — although she can have her say in the November general contest seven months later, after she turns 18 in August.
“It just makes logical sense to me that if I’ll be able to vote in the general election, I should be able to vote in the primary election that decides the candidates [for the general election],” said Ariella, a college-bound student in Advanced Placement Government at Seneca Valley and vice president of the Rose E. Schneider YMCA Delegation to Youth and Government, a national YMCA model-government program.
Ariella and others like her who will be 18 years old by the November general election but who are 17 at the time of their state’s primary election are known in political circles as “threshold voters.” Such voters are considered by some as a potentially pivotal subset of prospective voters, especially this year when Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders is seeking his party’s nomination. Pollsters say Mr. Sanders’ surprise win over Hillary Clinton in the Michigan primary this month was driven in part by his perceived popularity with younger voters. CNN exit polls said Mr. Sanders corralled the support of 81 percent of those aged 18 to 29 in the Michigan primary.
Neighboring Ohio became a battleground this month, not just among political candidates but also among constituents. At the nexus of the argument were Ohio’s threshold voters. In December 2015 — in an apparent response to a statewide campaign encouraging young people to “Vote at 17” — Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, reinterpreted a decades-old law in such a way as to restrict threshold voters from casting ballots in the Ohio primary. It was a short-lived edict. The courts ruled March 11 the secretary of state was wrong and that threshold voters could continue to participate in primary elections as they had been doing since 1981.
Meanwhile, just next door sits the commonwealth of Pennsylvania where, for all intents and purposes, threshold voters don’t exist. If you aren’t 18, you don’t vote, said Wanda Murren, press secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of State.
Could that change?
Ms. Murren left the door open to the possibility.
“Here’s what I’m authorized to say: The department is currently reviewing how other states are handling this,” she said.
There are about two dozen states that acknowledge threshold voters.
Ms. Murren said that even if change is in the wind, it wouldn’t be possible for it to impact this year’s primary contest. “Things just don’t happen that fast,” she said, noting the deadline for registering to vote in this year’s primary is today.
She said the issue of giving 17-year-olds the right to vote in a primary election as long as they would turn 18 before the general election later in the same year has been discussed before.
Ariella proposed that the political process could be enhanced by allowing younger people to play a bigger part.
“This election isn’t going in a way that I had hoped it would. In my view, all the drama that’s going down, it’s just polarizing people. ... It’s not the way that I would hope that people would pick the leader of a country — a person who will be a world leader,” she said.
She’s particularly disheartened by Republican candidate Donald Trump’s “tactics.” Though she said she considers herself politically conservative, she commented: “I could never support him.”
Ariella said she sees many in her generation as “people who want to be involved. We can change things. We’re [young adults] about to start college and we are realizing that some of the recent events — domestic conflict, terror around the world — well, it’s a really important time in history and the election of our president will have an impact on our own country and the world’s future. I’d like to be able to have a say in that.”
Karen Kane: kkane@post-gazette.com or at 724-772-9180.
First Published: March 28, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
