Lowering the Voting Age

16 or 18 years old? Is there a difference? To some those two years make all the difference. In this age when information is readily available to any and all people no matter the age via the Internet, some have argued that it is time to lower the voting age. Others continue to claim that 16 and 17 year olds are just too immature and disinterested as a whole for the change to be justifiable.

Until 1971 the legal voting age in the United States was 21. It took a constitutional amendment to (the 26th) to lower the voting age to 18. Thirty-five years later many are calling for yet again another lowering of the age. Some argue, if 21 years old was too high, why isn’t 18 too high? The constitutional amendment states that anyone eighteen or older has the right to vote but does not specify that someone younger does not have the same right.

Young people between the ages of 18 and 24 have the lowest voter registration and voter turnout of any group in the country. In fact, it has decreased between 13 and 15 per cent since the constitutional amendment in 1971. Some people have made claims that mock elections show that the 16 and 17 year olds will have a higher turnout. I do not believe that mock elections are valid because they are usually one-time instances where the lower voting age may be glamorized or highly publicized. With so much emphasis on that one aspect, one can not truly measure what the voter turnout would be years down the road once the novelty wore off. Of course if you get bonus points in Social Studies class youth are more likely to vote but is bribery the way to establish voting habits?

As more of a side note, there are only four countries in the world that have 16 or younger as the voting age across the board including Iran and Cuba. The remainder of the countries have set the voting age at 18 or higher. I don’t think America necessarily wants to be in the vast minority of countries alongside the likes of Cuba and Iran (whose elections are fixed anyways). That is not a good reason, just something to think about.

Let me know what you think.