Austria
Austria does not currently have a direct equivalent of Student Elections — a nationwide, centrally coordinated mock vote open to all high-school students, mirroring the real ballot, and publishing results by region alongside the official outcome. What exists instead are narrower, differently-purposed programs. This page summarizes what we found so readers can compare fairly.
Why Austria is different
Austria lowered its voting age to 16 in 2007, for national, European Parliament, presidential, regional and municipal elections. Because most upper-secondary students can already vote for real, Austria's youth-election efforts lean toward voter education and turnout tools for real first-time voters, rather than a substitute vote for those who are simply too young.
The closest related program
The nearest thing to a school mock election is "Pass Egal Wahl an Schulen" ("Passport-Doesn't-Matter Election at Schools"), run by the human-rights NGO SOS Mitmensch together with the Vienna University of Education. It uses real party ballots and real voting booths, timed around actual elections. But its purpose is different: it exists for voting-age students who are excluded from voting because they lack Austrian citizenship, not because of their age. It is explicitly framed as a protest against that exclusion, and organizers state its results are not representative of the wider excluded population.
History
SOS Mitmensch has run the general "Pass Egal Wahl" for the public since 2013. The schools version began in September 2021, at five schools in Upper Austria around that year's regional election, and was expanded in 2022 in formal partnership with the Vienna University of Education. Separately, the German organization Juniorwahl ran a one-off pilot in Austria alongside the 2004 European Parliament election, but it was not repeated there.
How it works
Ballots mirror the parties actually running in the real election. Students and teachers set up real-style voting booths and ballot boxes at school, in the days around the real vote. Results are published only as a national (or city-wide) total, broken down by party — not by school or district. Whether ballots are formally secret was not documented in the sources we reviewed.
Scale
In the 2024 National Council election, 12,222 students at 74 schools across Austria took part, alongside roughly 19,900 participants overall. For the 2025 Vienna state election, over 30 schools and about 5,700 students took part in the schools program, with about 9,800 participants overall.
Most recent run
The program ran most recently for the Vienna state election in April 2025, following the 2024 National Council election. Both editions were covered by Austrian outlets including ORF and Der Standard.
Official links
A note on comparison
We are listing "Pass Egal Wahl an Schulen" here because it is the closest thing we could find — not because it is the same kind of project as Student Elections. Its goal, target group and organizing model are genuinely different. If you know of a direct Austrian equivalent we missed, please let us know.