Amid all the worries about the perennially elusive youth vote, there’s a promising trend to talk about: In a growing number of towns and cities across the U.S., 16- and 17-year-olds are gaining the right to vote. The numbers are still small, but the momentum is real. Advocates say it’s about nurturing lifelong voters.
This is not a promising trend. This is a stupid idea.
Take Newark, New Jersey, which allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in its school board election in April. Teen turnout was only about 3%. But that was better than the adults managed.
There’s a name for candidates who rely on youth turnout to win elections: Unelected.
Indeed, adding younger teens to the voter rolls involves building a lot of things from scratch. After Newark passed its ordinance last year allowing youth voting, officials had to rewire voter registration systems and launch a full-scale education campaign. It was about 14 months before 16- and 17-year-olds could cast their first ballots.
So this change is not cost-free. (In fact, in Oakland it took four years for them to be able to update their voting systems.)
…Nationwide, the U.S. Constitution guarantees voting rights only for people 18 and older. But at the local level, things are heating up.
Right now, Maryland leads the way. Several municipalities there have already lowered the voting age for local races, taking advantage of state law that makes it easy for municipalities to accommodate registration and ballots for 16- and 17-year olds. A local council vote is enough to change quite a lot of election rules, including, for example, allowing noncitizens to cast ballots.
Why in God’s name would you want noncitizens voting in elections? If the answer is “well, they live here” then maybe they should become citizens first, then gain the right to vote.
Not everyone was cheering. “People still just don’t feel comfortable with young people having a say in what they think are only money matters, but they aren’t,” Vargas said.
It doesn’t matter if it’s about money or candidates.
This question is about more than voting rules. It’s about trust — not just in systems, but in young people’s ability to shape them. And like Eichhorn said, some adults might just need to spend more time with teenagers to see what they’re capable of.
Kids are inexperienced, comparatively unwise, and most are wholly unready to cast an informed ballot. That many adults are too doesn’t provide a rationale for expanding the uninformed voter pool.
Of course, there are critics of expanding the franchise this way. Some argue that it’s a slippery slope, or that teenagers are too immature or uninformed to handle voting responsibly.
Yes, exactly. This is mostly true.
But Douglas points out that we don’t typically take voting rights away from adults on that basis — “even ones who may be legally incompetent. Yet bright, informed 16-year-olds can’t vote.” Fair point.
This is not a “fair point.” We have to draw the line for the age of majority somewhere, and society (via experience) have set that at 18. Expanding the logic of proponents, why not 15 years voting? How about 14 year-olds? 13 year-olds? Some of those kids are bright and informed, more so than many adults, as well. What is the limiting factor to lowering the voting age if not age itself?
Thoughtful civic engagement is a good thing, and we should want and make it relatively easy for people to participate in the political process. What’s not good is voting for the sake of voting and pretending that’s wonderful. This seems like an attempt at that.