Apex Method to Check Voter Age

One of the most common real-world use cases in any app is age validation. Whether it’s signing up for a service, accessing adult content, or  like in this case  checking if someone is eligible to vote, the logic is always the same: calculate the person’s age and compare it to the legal threshold.

In this blog post, we’ll write a simple Apex method that determines whether a person can vote or not based on their date of birth. If they’re 18 years or older, we return true. Otherwise, we return false.

It’s a perfect little challenge if you’re learning Apex and want to understand how date calculations and conditional logic work in Salesforce.

🧠 What Are We Trying to Do?

Let’s say you have a system that collects a person’s date of birth, and you want to know if they are eligible to vote. In most countries, the minimum voting age is 18. So, our method will:

• Accept a Date of Birth

• Calculate the approximate age based on today’s date

• Return true if the person is 18 or older, otherwise return false

Simple enough  let’s walk through how to do this in Apex.

🔍 Code Explanation

public with sharing class ApexUseCaseSix {
    
    public static Boolean checkVotingRights(Date dateOfBirth){

We define a class named ApexUseCaseSix and inside it, a static method checkVotingRights that accepts a Date input (the person’s date of birth).

        Date todaysDate = System.today();

We fetch the current date using System.today(). This gives us today’s date in Salesforce’s internal date format.

        Integer approxAgeInYears = (dateOfBirth.daysBetween(todaysDate))/365;

Next, we calculate the number of days between the date of birth and today. We divide it by 365 to convert it into approximate years.

⚠️ Note: This is a quick approximation and may not account for leap years or exact birth dates — but it works well for general eligibility checks.

        if(approxAgeInYears >= 18){
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
}

We use a simple if condition to check if the person is at least 18. If yes, we return true, indicating the person is eligible to vote. If not, we return false.

✅ Why This Is Useful

This method is a perfect example of how you can:

• Work with dates in Apex

• Perform simple age calculations

• Use conditional logic to return different outcomes

You can easily plug this into a registration form, a validation flow, or any logic where age verification is required — not just voting!

🧾 Final Code Snippet

public with sharing class ApexUseCaseSix {
    
    public static Boolean checkVotingRights(Date dateOfBirth){
        
        Date todaysDate = System.today();
        Integer approxAgeInYears = (dateOfBirth.daysBetween(todaysDate))/365;
        if(approxAgeInYears >= 18){
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
}

🎥 Watch It in Action!

Prefer seeing it in action? Watch this short video where I explain the code and test it in Salesforce Developer Console.