On nov. 17 local elections for members of the 98 municipality boards were elected in Denmark. Alle citizens aged 18 and above was invited to vote for their favorite candidates in the municipalities and in the regional government.

This year a initiative involving 31 municipalities held a youth election for youths aged 16 to 18. They were invited to vote too using a web-platform. This special  election was only used to indicate the involment if this agegroup, the vote didn’t have any influence on the real elections.

The idea behind the test-election was to tell young people about democracy and politics in the municipalities and to to let them ask questions and give advice to the local politicians.

In the municipality of Frederiksberg 29,8 % of the youths chose to vote. The percentage was lower in the rest of the municipalities.  This has caused the media to call the experiment at failure. But considering that 20-30% percent of the youth has spent time to be involved in the local politics, I would call it a success and a very good initiative.

The platform used to vote was from Assembly voting. Eash municipality had a campaignsite based on webnode (e.g. City of Frederiksberg)  and a group on facebook.