On November 8, many IHS students watched helplessly as America’s adult population handed the country over to a person who lost both our school’s and a nationwide student mock election in a landslide. Some teachers tried to ignore the election in hopes of keeping politics from the classroom, while others acknowledged that they and many of their students feared that, for the next four years, they were essentially going to be receiving hate mail from the government. This latter group of teachers acknowledged something that America’s democracy patently ignores: teenagers care about politics, think about politics, and have surprisingly educated views on politics.
Yes, this editorial is to explain that the justification for a voting age of 18 is a load of hogwash, and that there is a legitimate need, grounded in the ideals of the Enlightenment, for teens to be able to vote. Perhaps the most common justification for the 18-year-old voting age is that adults have education or maturity that makes them more qualified to vote. However, a Pew Research Center poll from 2007 found that whatever education adults had, it contributed little to their political knowledge: 69 percent could name Dick Cheney as the then-vice-president, while only 37 percent knew that the Supreme Court’s chief justice was conservative—and these statistics give a general picture of adult knowledge of current American politics. While finding representative data on minors is difficult (we couldn’t find any), there is little to suggest that adults are particularly qualified to vote by their education.
Of course, we could also say that knowledge of politics boils down to facts and that facts are easily learned: what really matters is mental capacity and judgment. In the context of voting, here teens are adults’ equals. After Austria recently lowered its voting age to 16, one study concluded that “In sum, lowering the voting age does not appear to have a negative impact on input legitimacy and the quality of democratic decisions.” Psychology also supports teenagers’ voting rights. Although there is a large body of research saying that humans’ brains don’t fully develop until their mid-twenties, psychologists today are also finding that teenagers are often capable of adult thinking and judgment. This may seem like a contradictory statement, but a 2009 study published in American Psychologist elicited a degree of explanatory nuance: teens easily mess up impulsive decisions, but when given significant time to deliberate—as would happen during the months-long leadup to any election—they perform essentially as well as 25-year-olds. Combine this with the fact that an adult with mild dementia is able to vote and a smart, politically engaged high-schooler isn’t, and we see that our system is illogical at best and actively discriminatory at worst.
To date, however, much of the voting-rights legislation that we’re proud of focuses little on competency and more on political equality to combat discrimination. Prominent among this legislation is the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which supports the right of any high-schooler to be educated enough to vote):
“… there shall be a rebuttable presumption that any person who has not been adjudged an incompetent and who has completed the sixth grade… possesses sufficient literacy, comprehension, and intelligence to vote in any election.”
The Voting Rights Act focused on guaranteeing African Americans the vote so they would be able to to defend their interests. Teens today are in a similar, though far less dire, political predicament: they have different interests from adults and lack the power to defend them. According to Fuse, an agency that specializes in marketing to teens and millennials:
“…teens are almost seven times more likely to list gun violence, eight times more likely to list war, and three times more likely to list education as among the most important problems.”
Thus, teens are being trampled by a system that currently doesn’t acknowledge them or let them fight for their interests. And the political and philosophical thought since the Enlightenment—which America and much of the world are founded on—has tended to see a systems in which a demographic is unable to defend its substantial interests as wrong.
It is important to note that if any one demographic group has a greater right to vote than all the rest, it’s teenagers. When politicians act, teenagers have to live with consequences that their elders don’t, which is especially troubling if teenagers have no say in their elders’ actions. This is easy to see in the impetus for the Vietnam-era 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18: proponents argued that anyone old enough to be drafted should have a say in the democratic process. One can logically go a step further: by analogy, weighting the votes of seniors the same as those of 18-year-olds, or if they could vote, 16-year-olds, is a bit like allowing every tourist in Ithaca to vote in local elections because the few days they spend in Ithaca give them as great and as relevant an interest in the place as locals.
This last point may be going a step too far, considering that political equality is something our society is founded on. However, many places, from Austria to Brazil to Scotland, as well as the city of Takoma Park, Maryland, have recently lowered the voting age to 16 without any newsworthy consequences—apart from, as was reported in an Economist editorial, a high turnout (at least in Scotland) and increased chances of the teens voting in the future. America should join that movement and lower the voting age to 16. Young people care about the world, and the government is perhaps the best body to improve it. As Game of Thrones, one of teens’ and millennials’ most popular shows, put it:
“Our fathers were evil men, all of us. They left the world worse than they found it. We’re not going to do that; we’re going to leave the world better than we found it.”