Getty Images

Since his 2012 election to the Washington state legislature, Rep. Steve Bergquist had been trying to persuade his colleagues to support a bill allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote -- and requiring schools to help get them on the rolls, a move the Democratic lawmaker was sure would improve voter turnout among young people when they turned 18. There was opposition and concern: Was it an unfair burden on schools? Did it open the registration and voting process up to fraud? And wasn't it already pretty easy to register in Washington, which has a "motor voter" law, as well as registration by mail and online?

So Bergquist used his experience as a former high school social studies teacher to his advantage.

He found a largely ignored, 1923 law on the books, a measure that established Temperance and Good Citizenship Day, to be observed by all public schools annually on Jan. 16 (or a school day close to that date). It was a lot easier to tweak an existing law than to get colleagues to approve a new one. So Bergquist proposed new language that would require schools to offer voter pre-registration for eligible teens on that day. He also streamlined the process to make sure schools would follow through: instead of having the civics lesson trickle down to teachers from state, local, district and school administration officials, the new law gives directives straight to social studies teachers' email inboxes.

The new language was passed and signed into law in March, helping Bergquist fulfil a goal he had as a high school teacher: to get more young people involved in a political process that affects everything from their looming college debt to their job prospects.

"I came in (to the legislature) really enthusiastic about changing the world, and one of the things I really wanted to do was to get more students actively engaged," says Bergquist (who still substitute teaches on occasion and plans to tour a classroom when students are pre-registered next January). Students "want to participate. They just need to be connected with that civic engagement piece," adds Bergquist, whose wants to have 50,000 more people registered to vote next year.

Washington is among at least a dozen states seeking to expand voter engagement and turnout by allowing young residents to pre-register to vote or allowing them to vote in primary or general elections before they reach the federal minimum age of 18. Utah recently changed its law to allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries, as long as the voters will be 18 by the time of the general election. Maine and Nevada made the change to be effective Jan. 1 of this year. About a third of states already permit 17-year-olds to vote in primaries as long as they turn 18 by Election Day.

The District of Columbia is considering legislation to lower the voting age to 16 (something some localities already allow for local elections only). Bills are pending in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico to lower the voting age to 17 for primary or general elections.

Early pre-registration, meanwhile, is allowed in 22 states, and bills have been introduced in eight others (Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina) to similarly register teens in advance of their federal eligibility to cast a ballot.

Advocates say the moves will turn youth into lifelong voters, strengthening democracy. "It's a vicious cycle." says Democratic Utah state Rep. Joel Briscoe, author of the Beehive State's new law and a former high school social studies teacher. "Politicians say, 'Young people don't vote,' so they don't pay attention to them. And young people say, 'They don't pay attention to us; why should we vote?'"

But "all of the research shows that the earlier people vote, the more likely they are to vote" the rest of their lives, he adds, so getting them involved early sets them on the right track.

The 26th amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that people age 18 and older be allowed to vote – but it does not disallow states (and localities, unless barred by their host states) from lowering the age, even for congressional and presidential elections, says Joshua Douglas, a University of Kentucky College of Law professor who has written on the topic.

"I think 18 is a really odd time to start the habit of voting," Douglas says. People that age are involved in all sorts of other life transitions – graduating high school, starting college, jobs or the military, moving out of their parents' homes. "A lot of changes are going on in your life, and we are (also) registering you to vote. It's a lot of hoops to go through."

"Lowering the voting age and providing opportunity to register will go a long way in improving turnout," Douglas says. He says that in cities where the voting age has been lowered to 16, 16- to 17-year-olds vote at twice the rate of 18- to 24-year-olds. But getting youth out to the polls is still a struggle: 18- to 29-year-olds consistently have turned out at lower rates than other age groups, going back to 1980, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Opponents to lowering the voting or voter registration age argue that there is an opportunity for fraud – for example, a 16- or 17-year-old, in the country illegally, who would then get a ballot sent to him or her at age 18. And in Washington state, legislative opponents had another concern, saying it was not appropriate for schools to register students to vote.

New York state Sen. Michael Gianaris, a Democrat, says it's difficult to get GOP support for his bill to dramatically expand voter registration. Gianaris' bill would automatically register people to vote when they apply for a driver's license or unemployment, are released from prison, register for classes at a state or city university, or otherwise engage with the state bureaucracy. "It should be a fundamental tenet that the easier we make it for people to vote, the better for our democracy," Gianaris says.

Democratic sponsors of similar bills say they believe Republicans fear an influx of young voters will help Democrats. But regional trends do not necessarily follow national ones. While 18- to 24-year-olds favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016 56 percent to 34 percent, in Utah, they were split, with 36 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voting for each major candidate (third parties took the remainder). And in conservative Kentucky, Trump did as well among 18- to 24-year-olds as he did among almost every other age group in the Bluegrass State, winning 61 percent of the young voters.

Briscoe, the social studies teacher-turned Utah lawmaker, says he had to convince his colleagues that 17-year-olds had the mental maturity to weigh in on who would represent them in government. A colleague asked Briscoe during a committee hearing on the topic whether he really wanted a high school senior class making such decisions, Briscoe recalls.

"I said, 'Representative, I do. As a former high school teacher, I will take 300 students in a high school class and put them up against any 300 (people) in the general public,'" Briscoe says he told the colleague. If trends continue, it's a constituency more lawmakers might be facing in the coming years.