Liberal Free Chat Zone

[ksquared]

This is why 16-year-olds should be able to vote
By Scott Warren
March 2, 2019 | 9:17am
(The author is an f'ing idiot. JMO. I wonder how old this nincompoop is.)

At the age of 16, we allow our young people to get behind the wheel of a car. Work full-time. Register as an organ donor. Donate blood. And we should allow 16-year-olds to vote.

Vote? That’s absurd, you say. They’re still kids. They’ll just follow their parents’ decisions. They can’t get their heads out of their phones long enough to pay attention to politics.

But lowering the voting age to 16 is not absurd. It’s actually a completely necessary reform to improve our democracy, which is ill-informed and handicapped by low voter turnout.

Currently, even in wave elections, like 2018, voter turnout is consistently below 50 percent. New Yorkers are tuning out of an increasingly vitriolic and dysfunctional politics.

Meanwhile, our populace is increasingly uninformed on the basic issues of government. A 2017 poll from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that only one in four (26 percent) can name all three branches of the government. (In 2011, 38 percent could name all three branches.)

We have prioritized STEM education in our schools at the expense of subjects like civics. If 16- and 17-year-olds could vote, however, schools would have a concrete reason to teach their students about democracy. And students would be able to enact their learnings in the real world, seeing democracy not as an abstraction but as relevant to their lives.

While it’s a given that 18-year-olds can vote, this was not always the case. In 1939, 83 percent of Americans were against the concept of 18-year-olds voting. The notion that 18-year-olds could go to war in Vietnam but not vote eventually drove states to ratify the 26th Amendment, changing the national voting age from 21 to 18 in 1971. But the constitutional amendment took over 50 years to happen, led by states first lowering the voting age to 18 on their own.

We need the passion of young people to lead us to a more engaged, better-informed democracy.

While lowering the voting age to 18 was a necessary reform, the overall voting rate has actually consistently declined since the 26th Amendment was enacted. In retrospect, 18 is not the greatest age to start the act of voting. At 18, young people are starting college or jobs, leaving home and not thinking about their communities.

A key reason to lower the voting age to 16 is that it can actually create lifelong voters. By ensuring that young people can vote while still in school, the act will become a habit. Indeed, in Austria, where the minimum age to vote is 16, average voter turnout is 72 percent. Lowering the voting age to 16 in the US could increase the voting rate for the entire country, improving our democracy in the process.

The actions of our elected officials have dissuaded political participation, and structural reforms have precluded voter participation at the scale we would hope to see in a vibrant democracy. But in some good news, the new Democratic Legislature recently enacted a wave of pro-electoral reforms, allowing for early voting and pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds and consolidating local primaries. The Legislature should follow by leading the nation and lowering the voting age to 16.

Our youngest Americans, millennials and Generation Z, will comprise 37 percent of the 2020 electorate. In a promising sign, we’ve seen widespread youth activism since Parkland, mirroring the Vietnam-era activism that lowered the voting age to 18 nearly 50 years ago.

Every single time we see positive change in this country, from the civil rights movement to the LGBTQ equality movement to the recent movement for gun control, young people have been at the forefront. Their blend of idealism, their ability to envision a better society and their unwillingness to accept the status quo always sparks positive change.

We need the passion of young people to lead us to a more engaged, better-informed democracy.

Scott Warren is the author of “Generation Citizen: The Power of Youth in Our Politics” (Counterpoint), out Tuesday.

https://nypost.com/2019/03/02/this-is-why-16-year-olds-should-be-able-to-vote/