Suffrage can be conceptualized as a snowballing effect. In spite of it being deemed a ‘fundamental’ human right, the people that have traditionally been able to vote have been white, property-owning men. Over time, new norms were adopted, and the reigns on voting restrictions loosened. We realized that government action affects more than just one minority group and that everyone should have some say in who represents them in a democratic government. In many western democracies, almost anyone can vote legally, as long as they are over the age of eighteen. Some exceptions include Austria, who started allowing 16 and seventeen-year-olds to vote in 2008, and Greece lowered its voting age to 17 in 2016. The results have been clearly positive. In Austria, where the effects of the law can be more carefully studied, there has been a noticeable increase in voter participation, and consequently a growing investment in voter and political education in schools. Another notable result of a lowered voting age was regular voter participation amongst that first age group.
Nonetheless, eighteen seems like a reasonable age. It’s the age when (in most countries and with some variation) you are deemed legally responsible enough to drink, old enough to go to war, smoke cigarettes, get married, apply for credit to buy a house, and gamble. If you can do all of those things, you should certainly be given the right to vote. But what made this the age in which governments grant political autonomy? In many countries, the age of criminal responsibility (the age at which you can be tried as an adult) is much younger, ranging from sixteen to having no minimum age at all. You can drive a car - a weapon on wheels - at sixteen or seventeen in some places. In some U.S states, you can legally possess a long gun before you can vote or drink. Why are there these discrepancies? At what age is an individual really responsible enough to have a say in the political process?
The school shooting last year in Parkland, Florida has brought up these questions again. The tragedy prompted a lot of high school students to become politically active. They spoke at rallies, on television, and organized a march in Washington D.C. calling for stricter gun laws in the U.S. Though many of them called national attention to their cause, they were counting on people who could actually vote to take their concerns into account. All of the politicians they spoke to in town-halls, in Congress, and in the White House did not have to be held accountable to what the teenagers were telling them to do because they weren’t technically part of their constituency. A lot of the political rhetoric following the shooting was about getting out and voting. At my own high school in New Jersey, we staged a walkout in support of the Parkland students and our class president gave a speech on the importance of voting - to a student body of around 90% under-eighteen-year-olds. At graduation, our commencement speaker, a former New Jersey district attorney, talked about how the biggest way we could affect political change was by voting. He paused though when he realized that not all of us were eighteen, and implored us instead, to make sure our parents voted. It was incredibly frustrating to have to sit and watch government make decisions that directly affect us, when we had no actual say in who makes those decisions on our behalf - although this is one of the central pillars of democracy.
In the United States, the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in the 70’s to ‘appease’ young people who were being drafted to fight in Vietnam. The idea was that if you were old enough to fight, you were old enough to vote. Isn’t that kind of what is happening today with all of these school shootings? If students have to risk their lives when they go to school everyday, shouldn’t they be given some sort of political voice?
There are a few youth organizations in the states trying to expand voting rights to sixteen-year-olds. In an NPR interview with Michel Martin, youth advisory board member for Vote16USA Lorelei Vaisse believes that a lot of the issues in the U.S directly affect sixteen and seventeen-year-olds and that they should be able to have some say in how politicians are tackling them. She explains that most of the opposition her group has faced claims that sixteen and seventeen-year-olds are not mature enough to vote or that they would simply vote in line with their parents’ views. She also says that most of these arguments have been scientifically and empirically disproven. To the first, she points to a study proving the “well-thought-out ideas” cognition in both sixteen and eighteen-year-olds are not different from each other, showing that a sixteen-year-old would be able to approach choosing a candidate to vote for in the same way an adult would. To the second point, she refers to the 2014 Scottish referendum, in which sixteen year olds were allowed to vote, and forty percent of them voted differently than their parents.
Some lawmakers have also argued that voter turnout among young people is so low that it would be a waste to lower the voting age from eighteen. This is a weak excuse for politicians who fear a larger constituent base to cater to and who perhaps fear that their political platform does not cater to what young people want. To add to that, the current political climate has definitely sparked an interest in politics amongst Millennials and Generation Z voters. The recent midterm elections in the states saw a historic increase in young voter turnout.
Lowering the voting age is not a partisan issue. It’s about fundamental rights and expanding political autonomy to groups who struggle to find their interests represented in government. It’s about adding more volume to the suffrage snowball. The right to vote is without a doubt the most effective way to make yourself heard. You can protest, and you can march, and you can hold rallies, but words can be twisted and messages can be misconstrued. There was some really unfortunate rhetoric fed by conservative media sources, calling the Parkland students “actors” being paid by liberal groups as a tactic to promote their political agendas. They didn’t accept that these teenagers were capable of speaking with prudence in the wake of a tragedy they experienced. Words can’t be twisted at the ballot box like this, which is why giving younger people suffrage is so important. Some countries in Latin America, such as Argentina and Brazil, have lowered the voting age to 16. It is 17 in both Sudan and South Sudan. While there are some obvious problems with the way democracy is supposed to work in these countries, they do get this part right. Many local governments in both the United States and Canada have already been allowing sixteen year olds to vote in local elections. Maybe we should seek expanding this rule to the federal level.
