Less than a month from now, thousands of civic-minded Maryland 17-year-olds will have the opportunity to help choose the new leader of the free world.
But in Montgomery and in seven other counties statewide this year, those same teens will not be allowed to vote on who runs their local school system.
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Maryland law will allow 17-year-olds who turn 18 before the November general election to vote in the state’s Feb. 12 primary.
That right had been stripped from 17-year-old would-be voters as a result of a 2006 opinion from the attorney general’s office saying that primaries must be run in the same way as general elections.
But in December, suffrage was restored to 17-year-old voters at the urging of the state Democratic and Republican parties and Attorney General Doug Gansler, who said in a memo that political parties have a First Amendment right to assembly that allows them to decide who can participate in their primaries.
The decision was heralded by hundreds of local teenagers who had objected to the 2006 change. And on Tuesday, the Montgomery County Board of Education passed a resolution urging the system’s 25 high schools to encourage students to register to vote.
But because nonpartisan races are governed by the state constitution, which says no one under 18 can vote in an election, 17-year-olds will no longer have a say in nonpartisan races, including choosing among school board candidates whose names will appear on ballots in February, state Elections Board Deputy Administrator Ross Goldstein said.
“The parties don’t get to dictate who votes in that,” Goldstein said. “That’s then decided by the state constitution.”
Ben Moskowitz, the 18-year-old student representative on the county school board, called that “anincomplete vote” because those same 17-year-old primary voters will later be allowed to vote for a narrowed field of school board and other nonpartisan candidates as 18-year-olds in November.
“It limits their ability to decide in the general election if they don’t have input to decide on who the nominees are,” Moskowitz said. “The way I see it, it’s really an incomplete vote.”
