Power to them. Kids and teens are part of our communities, they’re affected by decisions, so they should have a role in making them when practical. I absolutely trust a 16 year old to vote, and make decent community-minded decisions - most already do so and contribute a lot, just without the same rights as slightly older people. I think this is a step in the right direction.
Especially since kids who are working are paying taxes. Not that that should be the singular standard that determines voting rights or anything. But it is common for kids to start working at 16. Sometimes even earlier; I think in my state you can start working as early as 14, even in non-farm jobs, but it’s super restricted. So not a lot of employers hire under-16yo.
Like in the other way, we let 18yos vote and we know they’re basically still kids. What is it now; our brains our still developing into our mid-20s, possibly even further?
I will say, I don’t trust 16yos (or 18yos) with much. But I would feel comfortable with them voting on local and school board issues. Because it directly effects them and they should have a say. We trust them driving independently, for better or worse. We trust them to work, often with money and other goods. Why shouldn’t we trust them to vote on these issues?
On top of that, in a couple of years after they start working and driving, we (as a country) start trusting them to enter wars. That’s a whole other can of worms, but if we already say “in a couple of years, these 16-year-olds can join the military,” then why not allow them to vote at 16 versus 18 when it’s only a 2-year difference?
Those two years make a HUGE difference in cognitive ability.
Why not 14? It’s only a two year difference.
Because working with direct supervision is a far cry from making decisions that affect everyone.
I have a 16yo, bless her heart. No way is she ready to vote. I’d far rather not tax children than give them access to running anything connected to law.
Part of the reason 18yos are “ready” to vote is they ostensibly have a couple years of working under their belt. 16yo have no idea how disconnected from reality they really are. Give them a couple more years to operate under responsibilities, first.
I’d far rather not tax children than give them access to running anything connected to law.
Agreed, but if they’re being taxed, they deserve a vote.
No way is she ready to vote. I don’t know, there are adults I know that I’m not sure are ready to vote, but we let them because the alternative is unthinkable.
I know part of parenting is that constant trade off of allowing a child to express themselves and enforcing boundaries they may not yet understand, and so preventing problems for the future by way of boundary enforcement, but voting in local elections and school boards and things that impact them seems like relatively low consequence.
The worst case scenario is that teenagers become the most active voters that need to be courted by potential school board candidates, who then propose policies that are actually harmful to teens but seem attractive to them, e.g., canceling school more or similar. And that seems fairly low risk considering that they’re outnumbered by adults, so they would need a substantial block of adult voters that agree as well. I think it’s a decent introduction to voting, with consequences for actions, but with a limited scale and scope that would do well for them.
Thinking about the issues on my local ballot in recent years, it’s things like library funding, police funding, school board and town council reps, judges, and otherwise appointing adults or approving bonds that have been requested by adults. I think teenagers could have valuable input on those.
I’m with some of the others in the thread. If they’re trusted to drive, to work, to be tried as an adult for crimes, they should get a say in management. Otherwise raise driving age and working age to 18 and be done with it.
Absolutely. Teens have responsibilities! They participate. And it’s true, at 18 i was much less responsible than I am now (or than i was at 16). I am sure it depends on the person, and lots of people of all ages make iffy choices. But yeah, school board and local issues directly pertain to teens’ interests and lives, I don’t see why they wouldn’t take it seriously and try to do good with it, especially since we already rely on people that age for labor and as you said driver safety.
You must know different set of 16 year olds then I do.
The hottest take is that the voting age should automatically slide to be the youngest age someone has been tried as an adult in the justice system…
Or lowest age to work without parental consent. Otherwise 16 year olds can’t vote for who gets to tax them.
That’s a damn fine take right there.
The graduated system of adulthood in this country is very odd in many ways. The age of consent, when you’re old enough to start drawing a paycheck, when you’re allowed to start driving, when you’re allowed to start voting, and when you’re allowed to buy marajuana or alcohol are all different ages. And through all of this you’re expected to conduct yourself like an adult while your brain chemistry is going through radical changes. I don’t know what the right system is, but I feel like it’s surely not this one. Maybe the increased franchisement these kids are asking for is right. Maybe we should just be expecting less from our youth. I don’t know
i think it makes sense for voting age to be 16 at least in some cases; internationally it’s not that weird of a policy. actually i think a big problem would just be the logistics of carrying it out: since the US doesn’t inherently have distinct election dates for municipal, local, state, and federal elections, it’s possible for all of them to be on the same ballot (meaning you could be eligible to vote in some races but not others and you’d be potentially committing a crime if you did).
DC and cities in three states allow noncitizen to vote in local elections, so clearly there’s a way to get it done. I suspect it’s as Nougat suggests, a separate ballot for non-citizens and/or under-18 voters.
Yeah I feel like I sound more negative about this than I am. I think generally speaking we should be raising the age of consent (this is the most critical change, I’m not okay with it being 14 in places), raising the age you’re allowed to start hiring at (seriously what the fuck Arkansas), prooobably leaving the driving age where it is though I’ve heard strong arguments 16 is the worst age for motor control, lowering the voting age, and raising the age you can buy lotto tickets and cigarettes at. In fact abolish the lottory. Tax the rich instead
So there’s two ballots instead of one. They already give you the ballot for the specific district you’re in when you go to vote now. Problem solved.
that’s a solution–but i’m guessing that’d singlehandedly double the additional overhead and complexity for printing and sending out ballots, on top of what those already have to account for.
My town has six districts for the village board but we only have one polling place for the whole town (it’s a small town) additionally you can vote early at the county office.
They simply print your ballot when you give them your name at the polling place. You fill in the bubbles and then put it into the ballot machine. It counts it electronically, but it drops down into a locked cabinet.
I’m assuming it’s the same procedure for everyone in my county for all the different voting/government body districts people are in.
The graduated system of adulthood in this country is very odd in many ways. The age of consent, when you’re old enough to start drawing a paycheck, when you’re allowed to start driving, when you’re allowed to start voting, and when you’re allowed to buy marajuana or alcohol are all different ages. And through all of this you’re expected to conduct yourself like an adult while your brain chemistry is going through radical changes.
I’m not so sure I completely agree. A better done graduated system could do a lot better than a single all or nothing system could. Specifically, drugs in general. It’s not just that drugs are bad or whatever. it’s that the ease with which a company can exploit a younger person, combined with the fact that under a general age the young adults are all having their brains still developed, that the cost to society for allowing drug use is a lot higher than the cost of allowing drug use for older folks.
I agree. Whatever the age is, we need to afford one the full suite of adult privileges. If we want it to be 16, okay, fine. Then we must allow them to drink, gamble, have sex, buy a house, join the military and get deployed overseas. And they must be accountable for their actions, so they must be tried as adults. Every time.
The reason the system is so confusing right now is that laws are written for convenience and political gain. For example, Democrats in the US are currently pushing for younger people to have the right to vote because they will gain a political advantage. I’m only on board with ideological consistency. It’s all or nothing. Define the age of adulthood and provide all privileges.
The reason the system is so confusing right now is that laws are written for convenience and political gain. For example, Democrats in the US are currently pushing for younger people to have the right to vote because they will gain a political advantage.
i don’t think this is really accurate. Democrats broadly don’t care about lowering the voting age and it’s not a signature plank for them–at most it’s an incidental part of voting rights. mostly, the people pushing this are youth activists who also happen to be Democrats because young people are overwhelmingly a Democratic constituency.
They’re against it because they know young people won’t vote for old people. Why would you hamstring yourself like that?
I’m all for it because it will cause the parties to favor more youthful people. Yes, I’m an ageist when it comes to politicians and for good reasons.
1.You can’t make sound decisions for the future if you won’t be around to suffer the consequences of your actions.
- Wisdom lacks agility. Yes, older politicians have more experience. They don’t have experience in the issues we face today. In fact their knowledge and experience runs counter to solving problems we face and will face.
That’s not how learning works. A graduated system allows people to gradually take on responsibility. Going from a total child to full adult is too much of a shock. It’s bad enough as is, with kids having a hard time “adulting.”
If there were to be a graduated system then voting would be the very last thing to bequeath. Deciding the fate of a nation carries far more responsibility than anything else I described.
I mean… that’s basically how it is now, excluding drinking. I’d rather they learn to vote before legally drinking.
Voting comes first right now. If there were to be a graduated system then voting should be the very last thing to bequeath. Deciding the fate of a nation carries far more responsibility than drinking. Best they learn to handle their liquor before deciding whether the nation should go to war.
This is a good idea. Politics skews way too far to the older side, when it is the younger who will be more affected. 16 year olds can drive and have a job, and while they have maturing to do, they are absolutely capable of the level of thought required to vote. Ashcroft’s complaint about 14 year olds wanting to vote is quite valid- but hey, maybe he’s right and they should just aim for 14 right out the gate! Lol… I doubt this will go anywhere, but I hope I am surprised.
With issues like global warming, they’re ultimately the ones stuck footing the bill while their grandparent’s generation pours gasoline on the fire.
I love this idea. After watching how irresponsible our state was with kids’ health and education these last three years, it might be time to give students a real, legitimate voice in their own public schooling.
Good for them; hope it works.
There is not a single argument against lowering the voting age that holds water.
Try it for yourself: think of any argument against it. “But what if they…” fill in the blank. And then realize old people already do that and we don’t require them not to.
“They don’t understand the issues!” MF’er, do you? “The Issues” is such a vague, broad, and nebulous term that you could use this to argue that anybody who can’t reproduce your exact opinions on demand “doesn’t understand the issues.” And here’s the thing: you’re not required to. Old people can vote literally by throwing darts at a board and not be disenfranchised for it.
“They’ll just vote for a celebrity.” Young people didn’t have the vote when Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse “the Body” Ventura, or Donald fucking Trump got elected to office. Hell, old people elected former actor Ronald Reagan and 40-odd years later we still haven’t recovered from the damage he did to the country and probably never will.
“They’ll vote for whoever is good-looking.” Disregarding that literally nobody on earth is that shallow, young people didn’t have the vote when Kennedy got elected.
“They’ll vote for whoever their parents do.” One would hope so; that’s called “instilling values” and it’s something most families strive for.
“They’ll vote against whoever their parents do!” Disregarding that this is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” logical-fallacy-circlejerk… one would hope so; that’s called “establishing your own identity” and it’s something most people should strive for.
And on and on. Every argument against lowering or even abolishing the voting age is like this. Either its a non-issue being made to sound like a catastrophe, or its something that old people already do and we don’t take away their rights for it.
I also like to draw analogies to other age restrictions. If they’re allowed to drive a car, literally the most dangerous thing they can do in terms of causes of death, then how can they not be responsible enough to vote for their leaders?
We also have no qualms about sentencing 16 year olds as adults if they commit a bad enough crime. This one strikes me as society knowing 16 year olds are perfectly capable of being responsible but we just give them a bit more leeway.
And personally, I’ve met plenty of 16 year olds that are better informed about politics than a number of adults I know.
I am so happy to find people like you here in fediverse. (I’m viewing this from kbin; not sure where you are; doesn’t matter! Here we are. It’s great.) I’ve been absolutely crucified on Reddit for posting pro-youth sentiments. It feels like most of society treats young people like dangerous aliens or something. So to find a friendly voice so quickly is really uplifting.
Some of it is distrust of young people. Some of it is a slavish devotion to “the rules” or “the way
it’s always beenI’ve always known it to be”.I don’t get the former, and I’m doing my best to never settle for “the rules” as an answer without those rules being grounded and justifiable.
Driving a car carries immediate physical consequences, something much easier to grasp than abstract consequences.
We don’t dump everything on them at once, because each step of adulthood and personal responsibility is hard.
Sure, and this is another gradation of voting; this would only be for local and school elections, which can have pretty immediate consequences for teens. In fact, 16 year olds (and others around that age) are the best positioned to have a say about school board policy, because they have been and currently are directly affected.
I do appreciate your perspective that a ‘stepwise’ system of adulthood can have huge benefits. I think this proposal actually fits quite nicely into it. They aren’t voting for president; they’re voting for the who will run the place they spend 8 hours per day.
Maybe it depends on where you live. Currently, our local politics is poorly attended. I shudder to think of the average local teen making community decisions. Among other things, we would end up with no police and my community is already stained for police presence (though some would consider that an advantage, I live too close to a high school to be comfy with that.) I’m guessing in more affluent areas, that might not be a big of a risk, but it definitely is here. Most teens here don’t traditionally work anyways.
Voting within their school, sure. But not at the community level.
Hmm, yeah, I think we have fundamentally different positions if you see the average teen voting for less policing to be ill informed or disastrous. I don’t mean this in a snarky way, I mean I think we would have a lot of ground to cover before agreeing on this point one way or another.
The one thing I would consider is you probably don’t know what the average teen in your community thinks, because they do not have a political voice. Sure, they can attend community council meetings, but why do that when they aren’t able to choose who sits on that council? Teens being disengaged from community issues and teens not being able to have input on community issues are fundamentally linked.
I agree with school, just disagree with local community voting. They don’t own or rent homes, and therefore have near-zero consequence for the outcome.
This. For all the bad votes young people may cast, I can hardly imagine them doing any worse than the adults have already done. I’m almost 40, and I am bitterly disappointed in my peers.
But let’s be honest. The real objection to letting young people vote is that they might vote left-wing. Every other objection is just a dog whistle for that one.
“They don’t understand the issues!”
I love how right-wingers make the argument that young people are too dumb to vote and only adults are smart enough, but when ranked-choice/approval/etc voting reform is the issue at hand, they make the exact opposite argument—that adults are too dumb to understand the new voting system!
It’s not whataboutism. I’m guessing you’ve never raised a teen?
I’m personally surprised by how important it has been to my child to chop up learning adulthood into small pieces. It’s a lot to take on all at once, and functioning adults take their knowledge for granted.
Seems like a decent idea. I have a pet theory that it’s not strictly that young people don’t vote, but that there is a relatively constant duration people who suddenly can vote take to learn that that is important. Kids, who can’t vote, don’t bother to think about it. And new voters tend to focus solely on the Presidential election. I think it takes roughly 8 years (two presidential elections) for people to learn that not voting has consequences. If we started kids voting earlier, we may find that they become regular voters earlier as well.
If somebody is old enough to work at a Target and get yelled at by Karens they automatically deserve the right to vote in my book.
Finally! 😏 The world is changing: the concept of a minor no longer makes sense in a context of irresponsible adults like today! Moreover, today’s kids have no right to decide the future that is penalizing them from an environmental and work point of view!
https://www.informapirata.it/2023/03/28/sinite-parvulos-a-truly-universal-suffrage/
Dog, you gotta be careful with that phrasing
yeah not a big fan of that idea. I remember my political ideas when I was 16. I used to believe that social darwinism would be the best policy, to just rod the world of the weak, and the strong would prevail making the world better. I was convinced of this by my other 16 and 17 year old friends, who likely heard about it in one of their classes in highschool. in fact a lot of us believed this, as 16 year olds are really easily convinced of ideas that sounds good when spoken. It didn’t take me long once I got out of highschool and started getting my first adult experience to realize how stupid that idea is.
The problem is high schoolers mainly experience the struggle of navigating social groups and are just trying to figuring out how to fit in with those around them. They are surrounded by peer pressure by those who also don’t fully understand the complexity of social relationships. They are bound to have strong opinions based on little real world experience.
Not only that, it is easy to manipulate large groups of young highschoolers to believe what you want them to. Does anyone remember “The Wave” experiment where a highschool teacher was able to convert almost the entire student body into fascist beliefs before dropping it on them what he had done? I worry that if highschoolers are able to vote, that our already corrupt politicians will absolutely abuse that susceptibility to their own agendas.
Is there any part of this argument that does not also apply to college students? This is a genuine question, not intended as a gotcha. We allow 18 year olds to vote although they are subjected to many of the same pressures and inexperiences.
Yes, but also no. But as in, not as much. 18-19 year olds in college have a lot of the same inexperience, but at least they are starting to get their first real taste of freedom. Where they are making decisions that actively shape their life, instead of it being decided for them. And a lot of 18-19 year olds go right to work after highschool, and are starting to see what it’s like to try and make a life for themselves. Dealing with jobs, banks, application processes, bills, and otherwise dealing with the systems that are affected by those they would be voting for.
If I think back to my first time voting after highschool, there was a lot I was kinda just going with the few things I knew, which wasn’t much. I didn’t like this guy because what he said, I like this guy because my family seems to like him. (I voted for Bush, because he seemed to do good on his first term and that John Kerry guy seemed shifty. That was literally it.) but I had at least started working and paying bills, and had at least the understanding that the ideas I held in highschool were a bit short sighted.
I think the main issue is that if you reduce the voting age to 16 you get a much larger pool of voters that can be easily convinced to vote based on targeted campaigning. And because the easily swayed, emotionally charged collection of 16-20 year olds is way more votes than the easily swayed emotionally charged 18-20 group is, a politician running a campaign targeted towards that group using extremist ideals, could really gain more traction and sway elections.
So I would be worried about seeing our very limited 2 party system start leaning even more towards the extreme sides than it already is.
I think these are fair points and definite possibilities! I don’t, however, know that I’d agree that these hypotheticals are enough to deny voting rights for local and school elections (remember, the 16 year olds won’t be voting for Bush in this scenario). So I don’t know if money and propaganda is quite so influential at that small scale–I haven’t found it to be in the past. Most people don’t even know their local elections are happening, much less know who the party line says to vote for.
I feel like there would be quite the pushback from a certain group of individuals.
I mean, if the young adults that can currently vote actually did, that might make a difference too
That is true, so many of my peers don’t vote.
The same group of people who find child labour and forcing a child to go through pregnancy completely acceptable?
Their trying to INDOCTORATE our kids to the left at an even earlier age!!1!1!!
This works great here in Scotland (unless you ask the Tories, who probably do worse because of it 🙃). Push for it!
