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Marrakech – With only three months left before Morocco’s legislative elections, a new civic-tech platform is trying to get young Moroccans to register and vote. The September 23 ballot will renew all 395 seats in the House of Representatives and shape the country’s political direction for the next five years.
The stakes are unusually high. The next government will oversee Morocco’s preparations for the 2030 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted with Spain and Portugal. Some analysts have already dubbed it the “World Cup government.”
And the vote comes less than a year after the GenZ 212 protest movement swept through Moroccan cities in September-October 2025, putting youth frustration over healthcare, education, and unemployment at the center of the national debate.
Yet the very generation with the greatest interest in the outcome remains the least represented at the ballot box. In the 2021 elections, three out of four Moroccans aged 18 to 24 did not vote, according to the Ministry of the Interior. Over five million Moroccans live abroad, and an even smaller share of them cast ballots, according to 2024 figures from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
When young people do not vote, the policies that will define their futures – jobs, education, healthcare – are decided without them.
The state has taken notice. Following directives from King Mohammed VI, Morocco adopted a new electoral framework that offers candidates under 35 public financing covering up to 75% of their campaign expenses. The reform, passed in late 2025, is designed to lower the barriers that have long kept young Moroccans out of institutional politics.
It is within this wider context that Sawti, a multilingual digital platform, has launched with a clear objective: make political information and voter registration simpler for Moroccan citizens, particularly young ones and those in the diaspora.
The timing is urgent. Voter registration in Morocco closes on Saturday, June 13. The Interior Ministry opened an exceptional revision period on May 15, allowing citizens aged 18 and older to register online or update their addresses. Sawti allows users to verify their registration status and begin the enrollment process in a matter of minutes, according to its founders.
The platform was created by two young Moroccan entrepreneurs, Ismaïl Lahlou and Yassine Lahlou Kamal. It is a nonprofit project. Its stated goal is to strengthen access to reliable political information and encourage broader civic participation.
One of Sawti’s defining features is its linguistic reach. The platform is available in nine languages: Darija, Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and German. Tamazight is expected to be added soon. That multilingual design is intended to serve both citizens inside Morocco and members of the diaspora abroad.
For Moroccans residing abroad, commonly referred to as MRE, the platform provides dedicated information on how to participate in elections from outside the country, including registration procedures and voting logistics.
Beyond registration, Sawti offers accessible content explaining how Morocco’s political institutions work, how the electoral process is structured, and what the main political dynamics are. The platform is designed with a simplified interface, aimed at users who may not be familiar with institutional jargon or the specifics of the electoral system.
A planned addition is an interactive quiz that will allow users to explore their political positioning based on their values and opinions on key societal issues. That feature has not yet launched.
Whether platforms like Sawti can meaningfully move the needle on youth turnout remains to be seen. But with the registration deadline now two days away, the initiative speaks directly to a gap that both the data and the GenZ 212 protests have made impossible to ignore.
