I had a long, text-based discussion with some friends this weekend. It started because of a conversation on a podcast that one of them listens to, where Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman discussed school shootings and the way the Parkland students have responded. While I didn’t listen to the podcast, my friend characterized part of it as an discussion about whether the voting age should be changed to 16 years old.
Of the four of us who were in on my conversation this weekend, I took the most radical stance (as usual). I argued for abolishing the voting age altogether, while being open to simply lowering it to 12 years old.
My friends thought I was crazy. As one of them wrote, “Kyle took the ridiculous award today.” With such a radical stance, that’s a fair assessment, but I want to try to defend my stance without the back and forth repartee of our text conversation.
The first thing I said in the conversation was that The West Wing did a segment on the topic, and I linked to an edited clip that collected the portions of that segment into one five-minute video.
If you don’t have five minutes (on top of the 15 it takes to read this post) or if you’re not in a place where you can watch a video right now, here’s the argument in brief:
- Politicians are allowed to ignore the interests of children because, in this society, children have no voice, and hence no power, thus it costs politicians nothing to ignore them.
- While “all societies distinguish between an adult phase of life with inherent rights and childhood as a time for development when those rights are curtailed,” the 26th amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, proves that “the line is arbitrary, or least fluid.”
- A supporting element for keeping the age at 18 is that it is still the common age for graduation from school and for military conscription, but the children argue that they can be tried as adults for a heinous crime, so if minors are mature enough to be held liable for their crimes, why aren’t they mature enough to vote?
- The adult responds that “You can be pretty dumb and commit a crime, but voting requires a level of reasoning,” to which the children respond, “Adults don’t have to prove any level of reasoning to vote, nor should they.”
- The adult concedes the point, but he gets the children to agree that they are vulnerable to being coerced, manipulated, and mistreated by adults, and he asserts that those same vulnerabilities make children unable to vote independently, but the children counter that those same arguments — “immature logic and being easy to coerce” — were used by opponents of “negro and women suffrage in the 20th century.”
- The children go on to argue that one of the reasons why most Americans don’t vote is because they don’t get started soon enough. As one of the kids says, “Churches don’t wait. They get kids at birth.”
- The children also argue that they have unique concerns that need to be addressed. The first of those is the environment: kids will be breathing the air and drinking the water long after adults have died, but they can’t vote to protect the environment. They’re also required to attend underfunded schools but can’t vote to improve them. Kids who work have to pay into Social Security without any say as to how the fund is managed, and poverty among young people exceeds all other age groups, yet the government spends ten times more on each poor senior than on each poor child.
- By the end of the conversation, the adult has been persuaded, except he cautions that he would argue for lowering the age in increments and not starting the process at the Federal level. He then gives the children the opportunity to address the president during a live televised press-conference, which he hopes will push the conversation to the fore. The kid does. President Bartlett is interested, and says that, “As adults we’re certainly not shouldering our responsibility, and your generation has a vested interest. Allowing children to vote is worthy of consideration.” End scene.
I’m not sure if any of the three people I sent the link to actually watched the video, but I know at least one of them did not (he’s currently watching The West Wing, and didn’t want any spoilers).
The stances taken by each of us were as follows:
- Friend 1: Lowering the voting age is “crazy” and “18 is probably too low for most males.” He argued that everything — in terms of becoming an adult — should be raised to 21. That would include driving, drinking, buying a gun, getting a credit card, signing contracts, and (yes) voting. Later on in the conversation, after Friend #3 asked if raising the voting age back to 21 ran the risk of further infantilizing our young adults, Friend #1 relented and agreed to leaving it at age 18.
- Friend 2: Didn’t really have a solid stance as to what the age should be (“I think 18 is ok, but I’m willing to listen to arguments for 16 and 17”), but he believed that whatever it was, everything should become legal at that age. It didn’t make sense to him to separate the age groups based on the activity: 16 to drive; 18 to vote; 21 to drink alcohol or buy guns; etc. He thought that if society was going to determine when a person is adult enough to receive one right, then they should pick an age where the person is adult enough to receive all their rights.
- Friend 3: Argued that a society needs to have a reasonable basis for a cutoff (on the right to vote) and “the age at which someone would graduate from high school is a reasonable [cutoff].”
- Friend 4 (Me): Believed that the voting age should be abolished, but would be willing to accept 12 years old as a reasonable compromise.
Let’s start with the argument that society needs to have a reasonable basis to cut off an American citizen’s right to vote. If that argument doesn’t hold water, then all of the arguments about whether a certain age or a certain level of maturity should be necessary to vote are moot.
In the United States, there are only two reasons why an American citizen would not be allowed to vote.
The first is due to the conviction of a felony. The states differ in how they disenfranchise convicted felons. Vermont allows convicted felons to vote while they’re still in prison, while other states restrict a felon’s right to vote while they are incarcerated, but restore it when they begin serving probation or make parole. Delaware restores voting rights five years after a convicted felon completes his or her sentence, but Florida and Virginia permanently disenfranchise their convicted felons.
This may be a reasonable restriction on the right to vote. As a Vermonter, I tend to agree with my fellow Vermonters in this instance — we should not restrict anyone’s right to vote based on their status as a convicted felon — but reasonable people could reach a different conclusion. I think Delaware, Florida, and Virginia take it too far, and I think that disenfranchising convicted felons is partly based on the racism inherent in American democracy (for more on that, see The 13th, a documentary about how the Thirteenth Amendment included a loophole that allowed whites to continue to dominate black bodies, despite that same amendment’s abolishment of slavery), but I’m open to the idea that one of the punishments for a felonious crime should be the loss of the right to vote for (and this is critical) a limited time.
The second reason why American citizens are not allowed to vote is because they are under the age of 18. The 26th Amendment reads, “The right of citizens of the United States, who are 18 years of age or older, to vote, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age.” The age was lowered from 21 (an age limit that became enshrined in the 14th amendment) to 18 because of the Vietnam war: if the government required men between the ages of 18 and 20 to be conscripted for war, then those same men should have a say in whether their country goes to war.
The argument was a no-brainer, and the amendment was ratified in three months and seven days, the fastest ratification process of any amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
But despite the amendment’s fast-ratification process, the argument for reducing the voting age in the United States had been happening at the state and Federal level since at least World War II. It’s often argued, as I just did, that the age was lowered due to the “old enough to fight, old enough to vote” rationale, and this is generally true, but as this dissertation by Jenny Diamond Cheng on the amendment makes clear, there were other arguments at play, including the idea that lowering the voting age would reduce the number of political protests being staged by the youth.
One of the arguments used in the earlier debates (but not really present in the direct debate that led to the Amendment) was that young people in the middle of the twentieth century were “politically ready” to vote. The advent of radio and television, the increase in political protests, and a strong public education system had made the teenagers of the 1950s and 1960s more politically knowledgeable than previous generations, and so it made sense to extend the franchise to the youth.
As Cheng writes, “This particular line of reasoning throws into relief the fundamentally conservative nature of the eighteen-year-old voting movement….Arguments about young people’s political knowledgeability, together with assertions that lowering the voting age would redirect youthful dissent into more acceptable channels…highlight that the campaign for eighteen-year-old voting was anything but a revolutionary movement.”
The conservative nature of the argument is why Richard Nixon could say in a 1968 campaign speech, “The reason the voting age should be lowered is not that 18-year-olds are old enough to fight—it is because they are smart enough to vote. They are more socially conscious, more politically aware, and much better educated than their parents were at age 18. Youth today is just not as young as it used to be.”
Cheng notes that “Politicians who favored lowering the voting age stressed that far more children were attending school, and for a longer period of time; they frequently offered statistics showing that rates of literacy, high school attendance, high school graduation, and college enrollment were all rising.”
If we were to extend that argument to reach a voting age of 12, we’d have to compare some of those statistics, but what could we compare? 12-year-olds attend school even more than 18-year-olds do, thanks to the age limit at which minors can drop out of school (different for each state, but generally 16). I haven’t found a way to compare literacy rates between 1960s 18-year-olds and today’s 12-year-olds, but the U.S. has had near-universal literacy rates since at least the 1960s, so it’s probably about the same, give or take a few tenths of a percentage point. And obviously, we can’t compare high school graduations and college enrollment, just by virtue of 12-year-olds still needing at least six years of schooling to graduate.
But we can compare the youth’s access to information. Cheng writes, “Postwar advocates of eighteen-year-old voting repeatedly insisted that thanks to an improved and expanded public education system, as well as technological changes such as the advent of radio, television, and jet airplanes, modern eighteen-year-olds were exceptionally well-informed about politics” (emphasis added).
18-year-olds in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s had such little access to information compared to today’s 12-year-olds that it isn’t even funny. Before you can say, “You ought to vote for this person because…”, they can Google their way to a non-partisan assessment of that particular candidate’s views on virtually any topic. Thanks to the Internet, any 12-year-old who chooses to become well informed can easily become well informed, much easier than an 18-year-old in the baby-boom generation could, having to resort themselves to card catalogs at their local libraries.
And therein lies the difference.
Arguments for restricting the voting age to 18+ take as some kind of gospel that a magical thing happens to a person at 18 years of age, but everyone knows that this simply is not true. For every politically engaged 18 year old, I can show you a politically ignorant one. This goes for individuals in every age group. I’d go so far as to argue that widespread political ignorance is one reason millions of citizens voted for Donald Trump: they either craved his political ignorance and/or acted out of their own.
What it comes down to is I’m in favor of giving any American citizen who chooses to vote the right to vote. It doesn’t matter if they’re 18 years old, 75 years old, or 11 years old. Every member of any demographic can, thanks to technology and the right to free speech, seek out reliable information regarding any particular candidate, policy, or issue, enough so that an 11-year-old of today can easily become more informed about a given topic than an 18-year-old of yesteryear.
It shouldn’t matter whether the 11-year-old does seek that information. We don’t require that 75-year-olds understand how to use the Internet to factcheck a claim, nor do we require 23-year-olds to care about any particular bill in Congress. What matters is that a person wants to vote, not whether they ought to vote.
What interest do we serve when we prevent children from voting? I can see why we might restrict a child’s access to alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana — their brains are still developing and the use of these drugs can have a dramatic on the trajectory of that development; but using brain development as a marker for voting leads to arguments for preventing cognitively impaired adults from voting (including the elderly), as well as for raising the voting age to 22, when the brain achieves its peak powers, and I don’t think anyone would argue for either of those things.
I can also see why we might restrict a child’s access to automobiles or guns. The teenage brain is generally prone to impulsivity, and too much damage can occur when a lack of impulse control is coupled with a fast-moving vehicle or an intentionally-designed killing machine.
But how much damage can a single 9-year-old voter do to our political system? How much damage could the number of active 9-year-old voters do? In 2016, roughly 70% of eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 29 years old did not vote. Do you think the 0-to-12-year-old demographic is going to turn up at the polls in greater numbers?
Allowing children to vote would not hurt our system in the slightest.
But think about how much it could improve it. The only group of American citizens who are required to sit in a room and be educated are children. They have roughly six or seven hours a day in which they are nominally committed to improving their understanding of the world.
Imagine that these children have a Civics class that not only explains the goings-on of their local, state, and federal governments, but also encourages them to be engaged citizens, not in five or ten years when they’re finally allowed to vote, but right now, when they actually have the time to do research, make phone calls, and send candidates letters and emails.
A few weeks ago, one of my students wrote a letter to our state representative in Washington D.C., and last week, he received a response. I’ve never seen this kid be as proud of anything as he was of receiving this letter. How much greater would it be if he could then act on his feeling of social pride by actually voting for that state representative in November? The experience would hook him on democracy for life.
There’s no way to hurt the concept of democracy by extending the franchise to children. There’s only ways to help it.
As we look out on the hundreds of thousands of children who turned out to march on Saturday, we ought to be talking about helping them amplify their voices by having them counted at the ballot box.
It’s my belief that the only test to becoming a voter should be wanting to become a voter. Everything after that is an arbitrary restriction with just as many arguments against it as for it. Society does not need a reasonable basis for cutting off enfranchisement, and its desire to enact one only harms the public interest. At a time when our democracy feels more at risk than ever, we should not be afraid to ask our children how we ought to improve it.
UPDATED: 3/7/19
Earlier today, a newly-elected representative from Massachusetts, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D), introduced an amendment to H.R. 1, the “For the People Act of 2019,” which has as one of its declared goals “to expand Americans’ access to the ballot box.” Rep. Pressley’s amendment would lower the voting age for federal elections to 16.
She has to word it this way because the 26th Amendment to the Constitution only defends the right to vote for “citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older.” She can’t lower the voting age on a national scale without amending the Constitution.
But she can force states to allow every sixteen-year-old citizen to cast their ballot in any election for Federal office. They could still be restricted from voting for local and state officers, but once the door is open, I suspect a majority of states will eventually follow and sooner or later, the Constitution could be amended again, if the majority of states felt it necessary.
It’s a step, and it’s a smart one, but I still hope the eventual morality of this tale results in outright abolishment.